Jaime Delgado

A web ontologies framework for digital rights management

In order to improve the management of copyright in the Internet, known as Digital Rights Management, there is the need for a shared language for copyright representation. Current approaches are based on purely syntactic solutions, i.e. a grammar that defines a rights expression language. These languages are difficult to put into practise due to the lack of explicit semantics that facilitate its implementation. Moreover, they are simple from the legal point of view because they are intended just to model the usage licenses granted by content providers to end-users. Thus, they ignore the copyright framework that lies behind and the whole value chain from creators to end-users. Our proposal is to use a semantic approach based on semantic web ontologies. We detail the development of a copyright ontology in order to put this approach into practice. It models the copyright core concepts for creation, rights and the basic kinds of actions that operate on content. Altogether, it allows building a copyright framework for the complete value chain. The set of actions operating on content are our smaller building blocks in order to cope with the complexity of copyright value chains and statements and, at the same time, guarantee a high level of interoperability and evolvability. The resulting copyright modelling framework is flexible and complete enough to model many copyright scenarios, not just those related to the economic exploitation of content. The ontology also includes moral rights, so it is possible to model this kind of situations as it is shown in the included example model for a withdrawal scenario. Finally, the ontology design and the selection of tools result in a straightforward implementation. Description Logic reasoners are used for license checking and retrieval. Rights are modelled as classes of actions, action patterns are modelled also as classes and the same is done for concrete actions. Then, to check if some right or license grants an action is reduced to check for class subsumption, which is a direct functionality of these reasoners.

An Architecture for Negotiation with Mobile Agents

New applications make networks increase their traffic daily, so a reliable and robust design must be provided to conform an architecture that could satisfy new needs. Terms as knowledge management, agents, ontologies, are key issues to achieve that architecture. Agent technology allows us to carry out interoperability and autonomy among the modules that build the architecture. Different kinds of devices are appearing, such as wireless devices. Then, a new group of applications are coming into the market, and a relevant characteristic is common in many cases: mobility. The general architecture for mobile agents applications we are describing in the paper generalises a set of applications and tools we are developing. We start the work in the context of Digital Rights Management (DRM), and a specific negotiation scenario and its implementation with mobile agents is discussed, before giving technical details of the architecture. This generic architecture includes elements coming from different disciplines, that are assembled to form a structure that fits diverse environments.

An implementation of a trusted and secure DRM architecture

Content providers and distributors need to have secured and trusted systems for the distribution of multimedia content with Digital Rights Management (DRM) to ensure the revenues derived from their works This paper discusses the security mechanisms applied to the implementation of a DRM architecture, regarding the certification and verification of user tools integrity during their whole life cycle, the mechanisms for providing a secure and trusted communication between client tools and the server framework for authorisation, certification or verification purposes, and the mechanisms for the secure storage and resynchronisation of the reports that describe the actions performed by users during the tool offline operation The presented architecture is being implemented in the AXMEDIS project, which aims to create an innovative technology framework for the automatic production, protection and distribution of digital cross media contents over a range of different media channels, including PC (on the Internet), PDA, kiosks, mobile phones and i-TV.

Standardisation of the management of intellectual property rights in multimedia content

Intellectual property rights (IPR) management is a key issue for the deployment of real e-commerce and multimedia content distribution on the Web. The music market is well aware of this problem, and very different approaches are being considered to cope with it. One valid approach is to develop standards allowing interoperability of solutions, and MPEG is one international standardisation initiative trying to do this. In particular, the new MPEG-21 standard is proposing that the standardisation of a digital rights expression language and rights data dictionary would help to improve system and application interoperability. The main objective of the paper is to present our approach, that goes one step further than MPEG, since we are developing a semantic approach to represent and manage IPR.

Rights and trust in multimedia information management

Multimedia information management, which implies all steps from creation and production to distribution and consumption, is a complex and challenging research area. To have a secure and trusted system we need to take into account aspects such as digital rights management (DRM), certification, control and security. As current solutions rely on proprietary architectures and tools, we propose an open architecture, as general as possible and not restricted to a specific standard, which provides trust and rights management in multimedia information systems. We analyse how the elements of the architecture provide trust to the whole value chain by managing multimedia content and digital rights represented using current standards, such as MPEG-21 and OMA DRM, and we compare it with an alternative approach. Then, we illustrate the system operation through a content composition use case, and finally, we present the software tools that we have already developed and the future work.

Network and Application Security in Mobile e-Health Applications

Different IT applications require different network and application security services. We have been working in the area of e-health applications in mobile environments, and we have needed to integrate security services therein. This paper presents a specification of such network and application security services for mobile e-health applications and how we have implemented them. First, various security threats specific of e-health applications are described, like patients’ data eavesdropping and manipulation. The different security mechanisms to address these specific security threats are then described, e.g., data confidentiality and integrity. Following, the specification of the network and application security requirements and the implementation possibilities to address them in the mobile e-health applications are described. As an example of network and application security services integrated into an e-health system, the paper includes the description of the mobile e-health application MobiHealth, an application developed within the European Commission co-funded MobiHealth project (IST–2001–36006), focusing on the security services added to it.

Architecture of a semantic XPath processor. application to digital rights management

This work describes a novel strategy for designing an XPath processor that acts over an RDF mapping of XML. We use a model-mapping approach to represent instances of XML and XML Schema in RDF. This representation retains the node order, in contrast with the usual structure-mapping approach. The processor can be fed with an unlimited set of XML schemas and/or RDFS/OWL ontologies. The queries are resolved taking into consideration the structural and semantic connections described in the schemas and ontologies. Such behavior, schema-awareness and semantic integration, can be useful for exploiting schema and ontology hierarchies in XPath queries. We test our approach in the Digital Rights Management (DRM) domain. We explore how the processor can be used in the two main rights expression languages (REL),: MPEG-21 REL and ODRL.

Architecture and Protocols for the Protection and Management of Multimedia Information

The management of multimedia information is a key issue when permissions, protection issues and rights are involved. The appearance of new multimedia description formats, new distribution channels and diverse business models makes it difficult to provide a general solution for performing such management. In this scenario, the description of architectures and protocols appears as a valid approach in the way to obtain results that could be adapted to the changing scenario present nowadays in the multimedia arena. MPEG–21, in its aim to provide a multimedia framework, is a good starting point for describing candidate modules for implementing a system that works inside the framework. Based on some of its parts, as currently 16 parts are being considered within the standard, we propose a modular architecture to cope with the complexity of the rights management and protection of multimedia information. This architecture is by no means complete, but is intended to map a standard to something more usable. The use of the modules defined in the architecture is illustrated with some examples, which show how protected multimedia information can be processed in the context of a real system based on an international standard, such as MPEG–21.

Delivery Context Negotiated by Mobile Agents Using CC/PP

Our approach to content negotiation is a framework of mobile agents, where the agents can migrate from user devices to negotiation servers in order to get access to more resources. We took this approach and now we introduce new features in the architecture. The key idea is content customisation depending on device description with CC/PP (Composite Capability/Preference Profile). The objective is twofold. First, to improve consumer experience adjusting contents to consumption devices. Second, to rationalise network and device use spending only the necessary resources. Altogether, it is a new step in the direction marked by the use of mobile agents in mobile devices. This way, computation and bandwidth consumption can be moved out of mobile devices to network devices, where these resources are cheaper. Moreover, in contrast to direct browser-server content negotiation, our agent based negotiation framework provides independence between content negotiation and its consumption, i.e. content can be negotiated and experienced in different user devices, thus better adjusting to user preferences. All this would be especially relevant when third generation (3G) mobile devices are widely available and more sophisticated multimedia content is available in mobile delivery contexts.

Use of Semantic Tools for a Digital Rights Dictionary

RDDOnto is an ontology that translates the MPEG-21 RDD (Rights Data Dictionary) specification into a hierarchical set of definitions with semantic content included. In the event that this set of definitions is used, the RDDOnto must provide well-defined semantics to determine which rights apply to data at all points within the hierarchy. RDDOnto translates the RDD specification into a machine-readable semantic engine that enables automatic handling of rights expressions. The Terms defined in the RDD Specification are what is going to be modelled using OWL (Web Ontology Language). For each Term, its description is composed by a set of descriptive attributes. With OWL, all the RDD relations between a term and other terms that capture its semantics have been mapped to RDDOnto. The specification of MPEG-21 RDD using OWL has also allowed to verify the consistency of the dictionary.