May the FORCE be with you? A Framework for ODRL Rule Compliance through Evaluation

Wout Slabbinck, Julian Rojas, Beatriz Esteves, Ruben Verborgh, Pieter Colpaert

Keywords: Policy, ODRL. Usage Control

Abstract:

Driven by data protection laws, interest in decentralized data sharing solutions has surged in recent years.
To implement these solutions effectively, usage control is essential for ensuring regulatory compliance and interoperability.
The Open Digital Rights Language (ODRL) standard stands out as a potential unified language
to formulate fine-grained usage control policies, which must be consistently enforced through a policy engine across every node in the decentralized network.
However, how to reliably and uniformly interpret ODRL policies remains an open problem, often leaving implementers to devise their own solutions.
To address this problem, this work introduces the Framework for ODRL Rule Compliance through Evaluation (FORCE), designed to assist in policy development and enhance comprehension of evaluation outputs.
FORCE is built upon the ODRL Evaluator - a component rigorously tested using the ODRL Test Suite.
FORCE's main contributions are
(i) a guide on the several specifications and pieces of software we are building to work with the current standard and to test new features for a possible future version of the standard, and
(ii) a Web application that acts as a playground to test these specifications and software libraries.
Future work could expand FORCE to include more powerful ODRL Evaluators that can deal with conflict resolution or policy instantiation.

Submission Number: 7