A Digital Preservation-Legal Ontology

Digital preservation has the goal of ensuring long-term access to data, enabling future users not only to benefit from today’s knowledge, but also to reuse such knowledge. Therefore, the digital preservation of a business process has the aim of enabling the use of the preserved process data so that its re-execution is possible. Law is becoming an essential application domain for technology developments, such as digital preservation. For instance, the digital preservation of copyright protected data might infringe the exclusive rights of the copyright holder. However, problems with the legal domain can arise since DP users and law-makers do not share the same perspective and concepts. Ontologies can be used to improve communication and shared understanding, giving rise to greater reuse, sharing, transparency, and interoperability. This paper presents a legal ontology that provides a hierarchical overview of how legal constraints and obligations (e.g. IP rights and licensing issues) could be enforced automatically in DP systems. The correctness of our legal ontology is validated with a set of competency questions defined in a specific case study. The aim is to obtain a clearer taxonomical view of the necessary legal knowledge that will address the concerns of industrial use-case DP stakeholders.

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