Semantic copyright management for internet‐wide knowledge sharing and reuse
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/14684520810913981 |
| Published date | 26 September 2008 |
| Date | 26 September 2008 |
| Pages | 585-595 |
| Author | Roberto García González,Rosa Gil |
| Subject Matter | Information & knowledge management,Library & information science |
Semantic copyright management
for internet-wide knowledge
sharing and reuse
Roberto Garcı
´a Gonza
´lez and Rosa Gil
University of Lleida, Lleida, Spain
Abstract
Purpose – To extract the full potential from internet-wide knowledge sharing and reuse, the
underlying copyright issues must be taken into account and managed using digital rights
management (DRM) tools. The paper aims to focus on the issues involved.
Design/methodology/approach – Traditional DRM and open licensing initiatives lack the
required computerised support and flexibility to scale to internet-wide copyright management. Our
approach is based on a semantic web ontology that conceptualises the copyright domain.
Findings – The Copyright Ontology facilitates interoperation while providing a rich framework that
accommodates copyright law and copes with custom licensing schemes.
Research limitations/implications – The ontology is based on the description logic variant of the
Web Ontology Language. Despite its scalability, this variant has some limitations on expression that
will be overcome with the help of semantic web rules in future versions of the ontology.
Practical implications – The ontology provides the building blocks for flexible
machine-understandable licenses and facilitates implementation because existing semantic web
tools can be easily reused. Moreover, existing initiatives can be mapped to the ontology to make it an
interoperability hub.
Originality/value – The paper contributes a novel approach to DRM, based on semantic web
technologies, that takes into account the underlying copyright legal framework. This is possible
thanks to the greater expressiveness of semantic web knowledge representation tools.
Keywords Knowledge sharing,Copyright law, Knowledge engineering, Semantics, Worldwide web,
Internet
Paper type Research paper
Introduction
Copyright management is a key issue for internet-wide knowledge sharing and reuse
because most of the artefacts used for knowledge storage and communication are
governed by copyright rules.
Traditional digital rights management (DRM) systems show their limitations when
forced to interoperate in open environments like the internet. Moreover, they are not
expressive enough to easily accommodate the licensing schemes required by the new
knowledge networks emerging in the digital space.
However, there are open licensing initiatives, like Creative Commons, which show
really promising results. But, they lack the required computerised support and
flexibility to scale to internet-wide copyright management.
Our proposal facilitates both interoperation and automation, while providing a rich
framework that accommodates copyright law and custom licensing schemes. It is
based on a Copyright Ontology, which is implemented using the Web Ontology
The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available at
www.emeraldinsight.com/1468-4527.htm
Semantic
copyright
management
585
Refereed article received
11 July 2007
Approved for publication
3 February 2008
Online Information Review
Vol. 32 No. 5, 2008
pp. 585-595
qEmerald Group Publishing Limited
1468-4527
DOI 10.1108/14684520810913981
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