Framework for ODRL Rule Compliance through Evaluation

The Framework for ODRL Rule Compliance through Evaluation (FORCE) is open-source software that realizes the evaluation of an ODRL policy using the ODRL Evaluator. It does so by generating a Compliance Report, that states clearly for each policy which rules are active or not and the reason why through the satisfaction state of its constraints.
To further aid understanding, this web page provides a ton of examples. To load an example, you can select a test case from the ODRL Test Suite using the dropdown menu below.

ODRL Request

ODRL Policy

State of the World

Evaluating the policy...

ODRL Compliance Report


    

    


        
Why the ODRL Evaluator?

        

            The Open Digital Rights Language (ODRL) is
                a W3C standard that is used to express usage control policies.
                However, the lack of defined interpretations for these policies leads to inconsistencies and
                interoperability issues across different platforms.
        

        

            One notable example of these issues is the interpretation of constraint values as defined by ODRL. Consider
            odrl:dateTime,
            which is described as
            The date (and optional time and timezone) of exercising the action of the Rule.
            While this implies that the current time should be used, there is no mechanism within ODRL to prove that the
            evaluation occurred at the specified time. This problem extends to all left operand values in ODRL.
        


        

            Recognizing this need, the ODRL
                Formal Semantics group laid the groundwork for the expected behaviour of an ODRL Evaluator.
        


        

            Based on that work, we created the ODRL Compliance Report Model
            to represent the output of an ODRL Evaluator.
            This live demonstrater here generates these reports through reasoning over the inputs:
        

        


        
All the calculations are performed in the browser, facilitated through the EYE JS reasoning engine

        
 ©2025–now Ghent University – imec, Belgium. Source
                    code.