w3c / tdm-reservation-protocol

Repository of the Text and Data Mining Reservation Protocol Community Group
https://www.w3.org/community/tdmrep/
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Non-dereferenceable target Asset #39

Open RinkeHoekstra opened 9 months ago

RinkeHoekstra commented 9 months ago

If the target of a rights statement (e.g. a permission) is not dereferenceable, it is unclear what this identifies. ODRL is also quite opaque about how the identifier of an Asset or AssetCollection is linked to the actual artefacts.

How can we ensure that a target statement is robust enough to stand through a dispute? Are we adopting the URL semantics and saying: anything hosted under this URL and its children?

https://github.com/w3c/tdm-reservation-protocol/blob/a1e0c76ac2cc9da602a8f916951c70a4c33b6b18/spec/index.html#L517-L524

llemeurfr commented 7 months ago

At this point, it is difficult to impose to publishers to make this URL dereferencable. It would be still another constraint to maintain, on a website that may be managed by a third party. It is not certain that assets protected by a specific target are all in the same tree structure. And in case of dispute, what would be the effect of a http error 404?

llemeurfr commented 7 months ago

Reading again the ODRL 2 spec: target is an Asset or an AssetCollection.

It can be the URL of an individual asset (-> dereferenceable), or it can be node, i.e. a reference (URI) or a json object, which can be an asset or collection on assets with a uid and a source (which is also a URI, dereferenceable or not). Complex.

We added target in our ODRL profile so that a content provider can offer different permissions for different types of assets. This was added with extensibility in mind, but with no precise use-case.

As this ODRL structure is not protecting access to content (tdm-reservation is the proper tool for this), but a way to indicate which kind of licenses a rights owner can provide (this is an indication, a helper), the best course of action could be to simply remove target from our ODRL profile. At least for the current year, until a clear use-case appears.