ODRL Policies¶
The W3C Open Digital Rights Language (ODRL 2.2) expresses permissions, prohibitions and duties in a form many policy systems read. In FAIR² it is an export format: a dataset's terms are stated in its governance blocks, and an ODRL policy is derived from them for systems that consume ODRL.
Changed in v1.7.0
Up to v1.6.3 this page described embedding a hand-written ODRL policy in
fair2.json as the statement of a dataset's terms. Governance blocks
replace it: they are what governance services enforce, and they carry terms
ODRL cannot.
Which form is authoritative¶
fair2:accessand the other governance blocks are the canonical form. When they are present, a consumer reads them.- An ODRL policy is read only when a document has no
fair2:access— for example one produced by a system outside FAIR².
A governance service may publish the ODRL rendering of a dataset's governance
(for instance from a policy endpoint), marked as derived from fair2:access.
Mapping¶
| FAIR² governance | ODRL |
|---|---|
Access tier (L0–L2) |
odrl:Permission with a credential-tier constraint |
| +G community governance | odrl:Duty to obtain community approval |
| +S environment | odrl:Constraint on the attested environment |
| +P purpose binding | odrl:purpose constraint; per-column purposes target the column, with DPV purpose IRIs |
| +J jurisdiction | odrl:spatial constraint |
aiTraining: "prohibited" |
odrl:Prohibition of odrl:derive |
| Embargo | odrl:dateTime constraint |
| Data use agreement | odrl:Duty to accept the agreement |
| Ethics training | odrl:Duty to hold the training |
The tier, approval, environment, agreement and training terms on the ODRL side
belong to the FAIR² governance model's ODRL profile. They appear only in
exported policies and are not part of the fair2: vocabulary this
specification defines.
What does not survive the export¶
The mapping is lossy. ODRL has no equivalent for, among others:
- the difference between a declared and a verified purpose;
- the people exempt from an embargo (
exemptSubjectIds); - accepted identity providers and identity-assurance levels;
- the agent ceiling tier and agent policy;
- temporal phases;
- query governance: granularity, group sizes, linkage policy;
- Indigenous governance bodies and cultural protocols;
- the approvers and approval threshold of community governance.
A system that enforces a dataset's terms must therefore read the governance blocks, not the ODRL rendering.