Intellectual Property Rights Management Using a Semantic Web Information System

Abstract

IPR (Intellectual Property Rights) Management is a complex domain. The IPR field is structured by evolving regulations, practises, business models,… Therefore, DRMS (Digital Rights Management Systems) are very difficult to develop and maintain. The NewMARS DRMS is our contribution to this field. A knowledge oriented approach has been chosen in order to make this development capable of dealing with this complicated domain. This requirement and the objective of easy Web integration have made the Semantic Web technologies the best choice. NewMARS is a semantics enabled metadata managing system. Metadata is associated to IPs (Intellectual Properties) using URIs and it is structured using web ontologies. There are descriptive, rights and e-commerce ontologies for the different views on IPs. Semantic enabled metadata is then used to facilitate content providers to publish intellectual properties offers and customers to find and automatically negotiate purchase conditions. All NewMARS modules are interrelated using the ontologies shared semantics. This has allowed developing very flexible project infrastructures that facilitates easy adaptation to new IP e-commerce scenarios.

NewMARS is part of the Agent Web project, partly supported by the Spanish administration TIC 2002-01336 (http://dmag.upf.edu/newmars). The final part of the work presented was developed within VISNET, a European Network of Excellence (http://www.visnet-noe.org), funded under the European Commission IST FP6 program.