Legislative compliance assessment tools are commonly used by companies to help them to understand their legal obligations. One of the primary limitations of existing tools is that they tend to consider each regulation in isolation. In this paper, we propose a flexible and modular compliance assessment framework that can support multiple legislations. Additionally, we describe our extension of the Open Digital Rights Language (ODRL) so that it can be used not only to represent digital rights but also legislative obligations, and discuss how the proposed model is used to develop a flexible compliance system, where changes to the obligations are automatically reflected in the compliance assessment tool. Finally, we demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach through the development of a General Data Protection Regulatory model and compliance assessment tool

The goal of the thesis is the development of an exemplary application profile for one institution guiding the use of Rights Expression Languages (REL) to include the rights information of digital documents in the metadata. Cultural heritage institutions face many challenges with regard to the growing number of digital documents. One challenge is the effective and efficient management, administration and presentation or publication of the documents according to their inherent rights. A basic issue is the inclusion of the rights information in the metadata file of the digital documents to enable automated administration of the documents. The application profile is supposed to show the REL’s potential for solving the challenge. Whether RELs can be applied practically in the cultural heritage sector is not in the scope of the thesis and must be examined in a large scale study. As applied research, the thesis does not follow a strict quantitative or qualitative research method but gathers, examines and evaluates data to develop an application profile. Due to the focus on technical issues, it aims at developers and not at end users. To reach the thesis’ goal, RELs are located in the area of digital rights. Four RELs are examined basi-cally by literature analysis. In addition, various representative licenses from one library are chosen which are “translated” into the most appro-priate REL. The findings flow into a prototype application profile which is evaluated in one iteration step by experts according to heuristic evaluation to identify technical and conceptual flaws. Based on the identified flaws, the prototype is revised. Finally, the exemplary application profile for the METS metadata schema is presented and recommendations for further elaborated appli-cation profiles are given.

Throughout this thesis, we have worked on translating policies into RDF formats andtesting RDF vocabularies. Our goal is to create policies that can be applied to future indus-tries within a circular economy. While Onto-Deside is the primary source of motivation forthis work, we do not focus on it in this thesis. Instead, we focus on experimenting withpolicies and their potential translation into an RDF format. We also tested RDF vocabu-laries and made necessary edits. Cybersecurity is a significant concern, and our policieswere constructed with security in mind. Our documentation includes our struggles, fail-ures, and successes in realizing these policies into RDF and the changes made betweeneach iteration. Despite the time constraints, we achieved many iterations of policies andtranslations and compiled our conclusions about the translations and RDF vocabularies.