An Ontology-Based Digital Rights Expression Language: Design And Implementation

The development and popularization of Internet make the way how people produce, distribute, and consume the digital content changed a lot. But the mechanism of control and manage intellectual property is far from mature. So how to protect the right and obligation of the parties in trade is the main issue that people care and study, and the key to solve this problem is Digital Rights Management.Digital Rights Management (DRM) is the technical tool that is used to handle protecting intellectual property when producing, distributing, selling and consuming the digital content. It aims at preventing pirate, protecting the intellectual property of digital content, smoothing the distribution of digital content, guaranteeing the legal right and profit of author, publisher, distributor and consumer, and making the market of digital content more flourishing.Digital Rights Expression Laguage (REL) is the kernel of Digital Rights Management. It can express the information of authorization for digital content, and can manage the rights consistently in the lifecycle of the digital content, at the same time it also can facilitate the interoperation between the systems for creating, distributing and consuming the digital content.Beginning with analysing and comparing the existing digital rights expression language, we can conclude the trend and challenge of the current rights expression language. Based on the research and aimed at the challenge, this paper puts out an Ontology-based Rights Expression Language (OREL), and provides a set of API for OREL. Considering the future application, we have designed a DRM-supported system for play back digital content securely with OREL engine.