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Electronic Licensing with XML and Web 2.0 Technology
As more and more content is published electronically so the need for controlling access to it has risen. Early efforts in this field focused on copy-protection technologies (DRM), but a more enlightened approach emerges if instead content licenses can be agreed between parties and content then used according to that agreement.
This presentation focuses on the design and system implementations around the new ONIX-PL industry standard (developed by EDItEUR ), for representing license agreements between content producers and content recipients. Early adopters of the standard are publishers, libraries and academic institutions wishing to agree licensing terms for the use of high-value scholarly content. ONIX-PL is a high-profile initiative enjoying support from JISC DLF/ERMI and a number of US and European universities, commercial publishers and library systems vendors.
ONIX-PL license expressions are XML document which are machine actionable. For that reason they need to capture with precise semantics the implications of the legal clauses they embody.
This presentation will examine the challenges of representing machine-actionable legal agreements using XML, and in particular look at the semantic web technologies considered and used (or rejected) in the XML model designs.
Standards and models are of no use if they have no implementation or take up. The presentation will therefore consider how EDItEUR chose to develop a free Open Source software application for authoring and managing these complex XML documents, and how ultimately a full range of Web 2.0 technologies including XForms, pipelining, and AJAX were necessary in consort with more established technologies such as XSLT, XHTML and J2EE, in order to have a web application that dealt properly with the problem space while meeting tight development deadlines.
The presentation will this conclude with some real-world tales of software development and deployment (together with a demonstration) of licenses being created and used using EDItEUR’s chosen infrastructure technology, Orbeon Forms (whose developers the presenters have no affiliation with)
In summary, attendees can expect to learn:
- why there is a need for electronic expressions of licenses
- how XML and semantic technologies can be used for this purpose
- what an XML electronic license expressions looks like ‘for real’
- why XML licenses need to be created by non-technical users
- how to rapidly develop a web application for them, and the ‘real world’ software development challenges faced in doing so.
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Alex Brown
Griffin Brown Digital Publishing Ltd
Alex first became interested in structured markup when analysing literary texts for his doctorate (on early Shakespeare editions) in the late 1980s. Following this he worked as a developer on heavily object-oriented C++ application framework for cross-platform multimedia publishing, at the height of the CD-ROM boom. In 1997 Alex was one of the founding directors of Griffin Brown Digital Publishing Ltd, a UK-based company providing XML-based services and products. He is responsible for leading the company’s XML consulting and implementation, and his work includes advising clients on XML/IT strategy and practice, mentoring clients” staff, writing DTDs and Schemas, and designing and developing XML software systems in C++, Java and other languages. In 2002, Alex was invited to join the British Standards Institute (BSI) Technical Committee IST/41, where he contributes to ISO/IEC JTC1/SC34 in its formation of the DSDL ISO standard, among other things. Alex writes and speaks regularly on structured markup technologies and their application to information management.
Francis Cave
Francis Cave Digital Publishing
Francis Cave is an XML consultant based in the UK. He was a founder member of the International SGML/XML Users Group and is currently Chairman of XML UK, the UK XML user group. He is also Chairman of BSI Technical Committee IST/41, which represents the UK in the work of ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 34, and is editor of DSDL Part 9 Namespace- and datatype-aware DTDs.
For more than seven years Francis has been working with EDItEUR on the development and maintenance of a wide range of XML-based communication standards for the book and serials industries worldwide, including the ONIX and EDItX format families. As well as supporting the continuing development of the ONIX for Books product metadata standard, significant work is being done to develop XML-based standards for communication of license terms, with current and potential applications across the whole publishing and media sector. Partly as a result of this work, in 2006 Francis was appointed by the World Association of Newspapers to be Technical Project Manager for the ACAP Project.
Francis has operated a successful freelance XML consultancy business since 1999 and lives in the Surrey Hills with his wife Liz and two teenage children.