Defining expressive access policies for linked data using the ODRL ontology 2.0

Together with the latest efforts in publishing Linked (Open) Data, legal issues around publishing and consuming such data are gaining increased interest. Particular areas of interest include (i) how to define more expressive access policies which go beyond common licenses, (ii) how to introduce pricing models for online datasets (for non-open data) and (iii) how to realize (i)+(ii) while providing descriptions of respective meta data that is both human readable and machine processable. In this paper, we show based on different examples that the Open Digital Rights Language (ODRL) Ontology 2.0 is able to address all previous mentioned issues, i.e. is suitable to express a large variety of different access policies for Linked Data. By defining policies as ODRL in RDF we aim for (i) higher flexibility and simplicity in usage, (ii) machine/human readability and (iii) fine-grained policy expressions for Linked (Open) Data.