
 
considered, but also media fragments.  
To provide a scalable solution, we propose using 
highly expressive rights representations that can be 
connected to media fragments. This proposal is 
materialised into a Copyright Ontology, which is 
based on Semantic Web technologies. The ontology 
provides a common framework, based on copyright 
law, capable of giving support across the whole 
media value chain. 
Existing data formats can be mapped to this 
common framework and then benefit from formal 
semantics. First of all, media fragment can be 
identified using the W3C Media Fragment URI 
recommendation. Moreover, existing data, like 
DDEX data used by the industry to communicate 
information across the value chain, can also be 
mapped to the Copyright Ontology. 
Once integrated and formalised, it becomes 
easier to implement solutions at the Web scale using 
existing Web ontologies reasoners. This approach 
has been put into practice in a real use case, where 
existing DDEX data is converted into semantic data 
and connected to the Copyright Ontology. Then, 
reasoners have been used to help decide if a dispute 
on a media fragment is supported by the existing 
DDEX data and copyright agreement and thus it is 
possible to ask for compensation. 
Future work now is to bundle this solution into 
an existing asset management system like Fedora 
Commons
12
, which is also incorporating semantic 
technologies and media fragments capabilities. This 
setting would help further evaluation the Copyright 
Ontology in real use cases, pushing boundaries to 
test its scalability and incorporating other rights data 
sources, like rights agreements automatically 
processed using Natural Language techniques. 
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS 
The work described in this paper has been partially 
supported by the European project MediaMixer 
(Community and Networking for the Remixing of 
Online Media, FP7-ICT-318101) and the Spanish 
project InDAGuS (Infrastructures for Sustainable 
Open Government Data with Geospatial Features, 
TIN2012-37826-C02). 
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