These are your rights: A natural language processing approach to automated RDF licenses generation

Abstract

In the latest years, the Web has seen an increasing interest in legal issues, concerning the use and re-use of online published material. In particular, several open issues affect the terms and conditions under which the data published on the Web is released to the users, and the users rights over such data. Though the number of licensed material on the Web is considerably increasing, the problem of generating machine readable licenses information is still unsolved. In this paper, we propose to adopt Natural Language Processing techniques to extract in an automated way the rights and conditions granted by a license, and we return the license in a machine readable format using RDF and adopting two well known vocabularies to model licenses. Experiments over a set of widely adopted licenses show the feasibility of the proposed approach. © 2014 Springer International Publishing.