ODRL
Open Digital Rights Language
Judgement: Assess
Rights-expression language; relevant where data licensing matters.
RDF/JSON-based language for expressing permissions, prohibitions, and obligations over digital assets. Born out of digital-rights management; W3C ratified the Information Model (v2.2) and Vocabulary in 2018.
Sees growing use in European data-spaces work where machine-readable usage policies are part of the contract surface — ODRL policies often ship alongside ODCS-style contracts to declare what consumers may and may not do with the data.
Why this is listed as niche
Rights expression language designed for licensing, terms-of-use, and data-sharing agreements. Increasingly relevant for data contracts and data spaces (Gaia-X, IDSA, Eclipse Dataspace Components reference ODRL for usage policies), but adoption outside that frame is still limited compared to OPA for runtime authorisation.
At a glance
- Category
- Policies
- Governance
- W3C
- Status
- W3C Recommendation; v2.2 current (since 2018)
- First released
- 2018
Links
Related standards
Other standards in Policies.
- OPA — Open Policy Agent
See ODRL in context
Open the interactive Data Landscape to compare ODRL against every other open standard, or grab the raw JSON. Spotted something wrong? Open an issue.