ODRL Policy Comparison Through Normalisation

Computer Science > Artificial Intelligence [Submitted on 13 Mar 2026] ODRL Policy Comparison Through Normalisation Jaime Osvaldo Salas, Paolo Pareti, George Konstantinidis The ODRL language has become the standard for representing policies and regulations for digital rights. However its complexity is a barrier to its usage, which has caused many related theoretical and practical works to focus on different, and not interoperable, fragments of ODRL. Moreover, semantically equivalent policies can be expressed in numerous different ways, which makes comparing them and processing them harder. Building on top of a recently defined semantics, we tackle these problems by proposing an approach that involves a parametrised normalisation of ODRL policies into its minimal components which reformulates policies with permissions and prohibitions into policies with permissions exclusively, and simplifies complex logic constraints into simple ones. We provide algorithms to compute a normal form for ODRL policies and simplifying numerical and symbolic constraints. We prove that these algorithms preserve the semantics of policies, and analyse the size complexity of the result, which is exponential on the number of attributes and linear on the number of unique values for these attributes. We show how this makes complex policies representable in more basic fragments of ODRL, and how it reduces the problem of policy comparison to the simpler problem of checking if two rules are identical. Comments: Accepted at the 23rd European Semantic Web Conference (ESWC), ESWC 2026 Subjects: Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI); Logic in Computer Science (cs.LO) Cite as: arXiv:2603.12926 [cs.AI]   (or arXiv:2603.12926v1 [cs.AI] for this version)   https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2603.12926 Focus to learn more Submission history From: Paolo Pareti Dr. [view email] [v1] Fri, 13 Mar 2026 12:09:22 UTC (20 KB) Access Paper: HTML (experimental) view license Current browse context: cs.AI < prev   |   next > new | recent | 2026-03 Change to browse by: cs cs.LO References & Citations NASA ADS Google Scholar Semantic Scholar Export BibTeX Citation Bookmark Bibliographic Tools Bibliographic and Citation Tools Bibliographic Explorer Toggle Bibliographic Explorer (What is the Explorer?) Connected Papers Toggle Connected Papers (What is Connected Papers?) Litmaps Toggle Litmaps (What is Litmaps?) scite.ai Toggle scite Smart Citations (What are Smart Citations?) Code, Data, Media Demos Related Papers About arXivLabs Which authors of this paper are endorsers? | Disable MathJax (What is MathJax?)