What Does ODRL Mean? A Cross-Level Ontological Grounding of Permissions, Prohibitions, and Duties in UFO-L
For researchers and practitioners in policy languages and normative systems, this provides a formal ontological grounding that clarifies ODRL's semantics and adds missing normative positions.
The paper identifies gaps in ODRL's normative semantics—specifically missing authority structures and violation powers—and grounds ODRL in UFO-L, extending coverage from 2 to 8 legal positions. All axioms are mechanically verified in Isabelle/HOL and across a 39-problem benchmark.
ODRL policy evaluators produce verdicts, but say nothing about the normative positions a policy brings into existence, the authority structures those positions presuppose, or who holds the power to declare a norm violated. We formulate the Cross-Level Design Principle: any normative language with violable, consequential norms requires both conduct-level positions (Permission, Duty, Right, No right) and competence-level positions (Power, Subjection, Immunity, Disability). Applying this to ODRL, we establish that prohibition is sanctioned (violation possible and consequential), that permission is underspecified across its behaviour parameter (open vs. closed world), and that the formal semantics covers achievement obligations only. We ground ODRL in UFO-L, mapping each activated rule to a simple legal relator and extending coverage from two to eight legal positions; violation-declaration authority, implicit in every existing evaluator, becomes an explicit Power-Subjection pair. All axioms are mechanically verified in Isabelle/HOL and across a 39-problem benchmark under Vampire, E, and Z3.