Copyright Ontology (CopyrightOnto)¶
The Copyright Ontology formalizes the copyright domain to support automated and computer-assisted management of rights, permissions, and obligations across the entire content value chain rather than focusing solely on end-user permissions. It models core legal and business entities such as Works, Authors/Rightsholders, Rights and Permissions, Licenses, Contracts, Transactions, Agents, and Provenance. The ontology captures temporal and jurisdictional dimensions of rights (grant periods, territorial scopes), the lifecycle of rights transfers and assignments, and links between digital artefacts and their legal metadata.
Key characteristics include an emphasis on provenance and traceability (who granted which right, when, and under what conditions), expressivity for different permission types (reproduction, distribution, modification), and support for linking to external vocabularies (e.g., dcterms for metadata, FOAF/ORCID for agents, and license URIs such as Creative Commons). Its structure is suitable for encoding both normative legal information and operational licensing metadata used in publishing platforms, rights registries, and DRM-aware systems.
Typical applications are automated rights clearance, license management, tracking provenance of digital content, and enabling marketplaces and repositories to reason about reuse conditions.
Example Usage: describe a digital artwork as a CopyrightOnto Work with associated Rights statements linking to a License URI, a Rightsholder Agent, and validity dates to support automated permission checks.
Metrics & Statistics¶
Total Nodes |
218 |
Total Edges |
470 |
Root Nodes |
6 |
Leaf Nodes |
75 |
Classes |
38 |
Individuals |
7 |
Properties |
12 |
Maximum Depth |
8 |
Minimum Depth |
0 |
Average Depth |
2.93 |
Depth Variance |
6.62 |
Maximum Breadth |
6 |
Minimum Breadth |
2 |
Average Breadth |
3.22 |
Breadth Variance |
2.40 |
Term Types |
7 |
Taxonomic Relations |
118 |
Non-taxonomic Relations |
6 |
Average Terms per Type |
7.00 |
Usage Example¶
Use the following code to import this ontology programmatically:
from ontolearner.ontology import CopyrightOnto
ontology = CopyrightOnto()
ontology.load("path/to/CopyrightOnto-ontology.ttl")
# Extract datasets
data = ontology.extract()
# Access specific relations
term_types = data.term_typings
taxonomic_relations = data.type_taxonomies
non_taxonomic_relations = data.type_non_taxonomic_relations