AIUP: an ODRL Profile for Expressing AI Use Policies
to Support the EU AI Act
Delaram Golpayegani1,∗ , Beatriz Esteves2 , Harshvardhan J. Pandit3 and
Dave Lewis1
1
ADAPT Centre, Trinity College Dublin, Dublin, Ireland
2
IDLab, Ghent University – imec, Ghent, Belgium
3
ADAPT Centre, Dublin City University, Dublin, Ireland
Abstract
The upcoming EU AI Act requires providers of high-risk AI systems to define and communicate
the system’s intended purpose – a key and complex concept upon which many of the Act’s
obligations rely. To assist with expressing the intended purposes and uses, along with precluded
uses as regulated by the AI Act, we extend the Open Digital Rights Language (ODRL) with
a profile to express the AI Use Policy (AIUP). This open approach to declaring use policies
enables explicit and transparent expression of the conditions under which an AI system can be
used, benefiting AI application markets beyond the immediate needs of high-risk AI compliance
in the EU. AIUP is available online at https://w3id.org/aiup under the CC-BY-4.0 license.
Keywords
AI Act, ODRL, AI use policy, AI risk management, regulatory enforcement, trustworthy AI
1. Introduction
Within the EU AI Act [1] there is a strong emphasis on intended purpose – a legal
term-of-art described as the use of the system specified by the provider, which should
include information regarding context and conditions of use (AI Act, Art. 3). Given its
importance in assessment of risk level under the Act [2], and in turn in ensuring safe and
trustworthy use of AI, intended purpose of an AI system should be communicated to its
deployers in a transparent manner. In this paper, we aim to simplify the specification of
this key concept by adopting a policy-based approach. As such, we propose to extend
the W3C’s recommendation on Open Digital Rights Language (ODRL)1 to fulfil the
representation of intended purpose through an AI Use Policy (AIUP) profile. AIUP
serves as a mechanism for expressing AI intended and precluded uses as well as conditions
of use by modelling them as permissions, prohibitions, and duties within a policy.
SEMANTiCS’24: 20th International Conference on Semantic Systems, September 17–19, 2024, Amster-
dam, Netherlands
∗
Corresponding author.
Envelope-Open sgolpays@tcd.ie (D. Golpayegani); beatriz.esteves@ugent.be (B. Esteves); me@harshp.com (H. J. Pandit);
delewis@tcd.ie (D. Lewis)
Orcid 0000-0002-1208-186X (D. Golpayegani); 0000-0003-0259-7560 (B. Esteves); 0000-0002-5068-3714
(H. J. Pandit); 0000-0002-3503-4644 (D. Lewis)
© 2024 Copyright for this paper by its authors.Use permitted under Creative Commons License Attribution 4.0 International
(CC BY 4.0).
1
https://www.w3.org/ns/odrl/2/
CEUR
ceur-ws.org
Workshop ISSN 1613-0073
Proceedings
2. Related Work
ODRL has been leveraged for legal compliance and policy enforcement, particularly
in EU GDPR compliance tasks such as automated checking of consent permissions [3],
expressing legal obligations [4], and modelling the obligations in terms of permissions and
prohibitions regarding executing business processes [5]. In the context of data governance,
ODRL was extended for expressing policies related to access control over data stored in
Solid Pods [3], utilised for modelling policies associated with responsible use of genomics
data [6], and used in expressing data spaces’ usage and access control policies [7, 8].
3. AIUP
3.1. AIUP Requirements
AIUP is intended to be used by AI providers and deployers to communicate and negotiate
the conditions under which an AI system can/cannot be used. The competency questions,
which shape the requirements of the policy profile, are extracted from the AI Act and
listed in the following:
• CQ1. What is the intended use(s) of the AI system? (Art. 13 and Annex IV(1a))
• CQ2. What is the precluded use(s)2 of the AI system? (Recital 72)
• CQ3. To use the system as intended, what human oversight measure(s) should be
implemented by the deployer? (Art. 14 (3)(b))
• CQ4. What is the reporting obligation(s) of the deployer? (Art. 26(5))
To express intended and precluded uses, we utilise the 5 concepts identified in our pre-
vious work [9] that are domain , purpose , AI capability , AI deployer , and AI subject .
To further capture the context of use, we also include locality of use .
3.2. AIUP Overview
An overview of the AIUP’s profile is illustrated in Figure 1. Expressing intended and
precluded uses of an AI system or component within a policy are enabled by employing
odrl:permission and odrl:prohibition rules respectively. For expressing the conditions
of use, i.e., obligations that should be fulfilled by a party in order to use a system or
component, the odrl:duty property should be employed. The vocabulary used in AIUP
is defined in alignment with the AI Risk Ontology (AIRO) [10] and the Data Privacy
Vocabulary (DPV) [11]. The development follows the ODRL V2.2 Profile Best Practices3 ,
which requires the terms to be defined in the policy namespace (in this case aiup) with
skos:exactMatch to link the proposed terms to existing vocabularies.
AIUP introduces 3 types of aiup:UsePolicy , that are aiup:UseOffer ,
aiup:UseRequest , and aiup:UseAgreement . These enable expressing offers, re-
quests, and agreements from/between AI providers and deployers. To address the
2
Refers to the uses of an AI system that are prohibited by the provider.
3
https://w3c.github.io/odrl/profile-bp/
Figure 1: AIUP core classes and properties.
ambiguities around the function of odrl:isA in the inclusion of “sub-class of” relations,
we introduce semantic equality (aiup:seq ) that indicates presence of either “instance
of” or “sub-class of” relations. AIUP allows describing use policies for AI components,
such as general-purpose AI models, by specifying general concepts of aiup:AIComponent ,
aiup:Provider , and aiup:Deployer . However, it leaves out the inclusion of more specific
elements required for expressing component use policies for future work. AIUP is made
available online at https://w3id.org/aiup under the CC-BY-4.0 license.
3.3. AIUP Example
As an example scenario, we consider a policy for an online student proctoring system
called Proctify, previously described in [12]. The conditions of deploying Proctify, as
an aiup:UseOffer policy, are presented in Listing 1. For brevity, we only include 3
constraints for describing the intended domain, purpose, and AI subjects. The offer
indicates that the deployer should provide training to end-users of the system as a control
measure to address the risk of over-reliance on the system’s output.
4. Conclusion
In this paper, we proposed AIUP as a novel technical solution for declaring AI use
policies in an open, machine-readable, and interoperable format based on the evolving
requirements of the AI value chain, particularly the obligations of the EU AI Act. The
AIUP profile supports modelling and comparison of use policies related to AI systems
1 @prefix odrl: .
2 @prefix aiup: .
3 @prefix vair: .
4 @prefix rdfs: .
5 @prefix dct: .
6 @prefix ex: .
7
8 ex:proctify-offer-01 a aiup:UseOffer ;
9 odrl:uid ex:proctify-offer-01 ;
10 odrl:profile aiup: ;
11 rdfs:comment "Offer for using Proctify"@ en ;
12 odrl:permission [
13 a odrl:Permission ;
14 odrl:assigner ex:aiedux ;
15 odrl:target ex:proctify ;
16 odrl:action aiup:Deploy ;
17 odrl:constraint [
18 odrl:and [
19 odrl:leftOperand aiup:Domain ;
20 odrl:operator aiup:seq ;
21 odrl:rightOperand vair:Education ] ,
22 [
23 odrl:leftOperand aiup:Purpose ;
24 odrl:operator aiup:seq ;
25 odrl:rightOperand vair:DetectCheating ] ,
26 [
27 odrl:leftOperand aiup:AISubject ;
28 odrl:operator aiup:seq ;
29 odrl:rightOperand vair:Student ] ] ;
30 odrl:duty [
31 dct:title "User training to address over-reliance" ;
32 odrl:action aiup:ImplementControl ;
33 odrl:constraint [
34 odrl:leftOperand aiup:Control ;
35 odrl:operator aiup:seq ;
36 odrl:rightOperand vair:Training ] ] ] .
Listing 1: An example of aiup:UseOffer describing Proctify’s use policy.
and their components. It further assists AI auditors and authorities in investigation of
non-compliance and ascertaining liable parties when investigating claims concerning AI.
Acknowledgments
This project has received funding from the EUs Horizon 2020 research and innovation
programme under the Marie Skodowska-Curie grant agreement No 813497 (PROTECT
ITN) and from Science Foundation Ireland under Grant#13/RC/2106_P2 at the ADAPT
SFI Research Centre. Beatriz Esteves is funded by SolidLab Vlaanderen (Flemish
Government, EWI and RRF project VV023/10). Harshvardhan Pandit has received
funding under the SFI EMPOWER program.
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