ODRL Policy Comparison Through Normalisation

Fuente: arXiv
Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Salas, Jaime Osvaldo, Pareti, Paolo, Konstantinidis, George
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
Subjects:
Online Access:
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866911512240586752
author Salas, Jaime Osvaldo
Pareti, Paolo
Konstantinidis, George
author_facet Salas, Jaime Osvaldo
Pareti, Paolo
Konstantinidis, George
contents The ODRL language has become the standard for representing policies and regulations for digital rights. However its complexity is a barrier to its usage, which has caused many related theoretical and practical works to focus on different, and not interoperable, fragments of ODRL. Moreover, semantically equivalent policies can be expressed in numerous different ways, which makes comparing them and processing them harder. Building on top of a recently defined semantics, we tackle these problems by proposing an approach that involves a parametrised normalisation of ODRL policies into its minimal components which reformulates policies with permissions and prohibitions into policies with permissions exclusively, and simplifies complex logic constraints into simple ones. We provide algorithms to compute a normal form for ODRL policies and simplifying numerical and symbolic constraints. We prove that these algorithms preserve the semantics of policies, and analyse the size complexity of the result, which is exponential on the number of attributes and linear on the number of unique values for these attributes. We show how this makes complex policies representable in more basic fragments of ODRL, and how it reduces the problem of policy comparison to the simpler problem of checking if two rules are identical.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2603_12926
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle ODRL Policy Comparison Through Normalisation
Salas, Jaime Osvaldo
Pareti, Paolo
Konstantinidis, George
Artificial Intelligence
Logic in Computer Science
The ODRL language has become the standard for representing policies and regulations for digital rights. However its complexity is a barrier to its usage, which has caused many related theoretical and practical works to focus on different, and not interoperable, fragments of ODRL. Moreover, semantically equivalent policies can be expressed in numerous different ways, which makes comparing them and processing them harder. Building on top of a recently defined semantics, we tackle these problems by proposing an approach that involves a parametrised normalisation of ODRL policies into its minimal components which reformulates policies with permissions and prohibitions into policies with permissions exclusively, and simplifies complex logic constraints into simple ones. We provide algorithms to compute a normal form for ODRL policies and simplifying numerical and symbolic constraints. We prove that these algorithms preserve the semantics of policies, and analyse the size complexity of the result, which is exponential on the number of attributes and linear on the number of unique values for these attributes. We show how this makes complex policies representable in more basic fragments of ODRL, and how it reduces the problem of policy comparison to the simpler problem of checking if two rules are identical.
title ODRL Policy Comparison Through Normalisation
topic Artificial Intelligence
Logic in Computer Science
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.12926