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Ruben Verborgh

May the FORCE Be with You? A Framework for ODRL Rule Compliance through Evaluation

Wout Slabbinck, Julián Rojas Meléndez, Beatriz Esteves, Ruben Verborgh, and Pieter Colpaert

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 for formulating 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

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Published in 2025 in Proceedings of the Workshop on NeXt-generation Data Governance.

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Cite this article easily using its BibTeX entry: 

@inproceedings{slabbinck_semantics_2025,
  author = {Slabbinck, Wout and Rojas Mel\'endez, Juli\'an and Esteves, Beatriz and Verborgh, Ruben and Colpaert, Pieter},
  title = {May the {FORCE} Be with You? A Framework for {ODRL} Rule Compliance through Evaluation},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the Workshop on NeXt-generation Data Governance},
  editor = {Chaves-Fraga, David and Heibi, Ivan and Garijo, Daniel and Collarana, Diego and Salatino, Angelo and Vahdati, Sahar},
  year = 2025,
  month = sep,
  series = {CEUR Workshop Proceedings},
  volume = 4064,
  issn = {1613-0073},
  publisher = {CEUR},
  url = {https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-4064/NXDG25-paper6.pdf},
}

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ACM
Wout Slabbinck, Julián Rojas Meléndez, Beatriz Esteves, Ruben Verborgh, and Pieter Colpaert. 2025. May the FORCE Be with You? A Framework for ODRL Rule Compliance through Evaluation. In Proceedings of the Workshop on NeXt-generation Data Governance (CEUR Workshop Proceedings), CEUR.
APA
Slabbinck, W., Rojas Meléndez, J., Esteves, B., Verborgh, R., & Colpaert, P. (2025). May the FORCE Be with You? A Framework for ODRL Rule Compliance through Evaluation. In D. Chaves-Fraga, I. Heibi, D. Garijo, D. Collarana, A. Salatino, & S. Vahdati (Eds.), Proceedings of the Workshop on NeXt-generation Data Governance (Vol. 4064). CEUR.
IEEE
W. Slabbinck, J. Rojas Meléndez, B. Esteves, R. Verborgh, and P. Colpaert, “May the FORCE Be with You? A Framework for ODRL Rule Compliance through Evaluation,” in Proceedings of the Workshop on NeXt-generation Data Governance, 2025, vol. 4064.
LNCS
Slabbinck, W., Rojas Meléndez, J., Esteves, B., Verborgh, R., Colpaert, P.: May the FORCE Be with You? A Framework for ODRL Rule Compliance through Evaluation. In: Chaves-Fraga, D., Heibi, I., Garijo, D., Collarana, D., Salatino, A., and Vahdati, S. (eds.) Proceedings of the Workshop on NeXt-generation Data Governance. CEUR (2025).
MLA
Slabbinck, Wout, et al. “May the FORCE Be with You? A Framework for ODRL Rule Compliance through Evaluation.” Proceedings of the Workshop on NeXt-Generation Data Governance, edited by David Chaves-Fraga et al., vol. 4064, CEUR, 2025.