The goal of the first International Workshop on “ODRL and beyond: Practical Applications and challenges for poLicy-base access and usage control” (OPAL2025)1 is to bring together researchers and practitioners interested in the scientific, technological, and practical aspects and challenges in implementing systems to control policy-based access to and use of online data and resources. The workshop was held in conjunction with the 22nd Extended 1https://opal-workshop.github.io/2025/ ODRL and Beyond: Practical Applications and Challenges for Policy-base Access and Usage Control. OPAL 2025 Co-located with https://portalcientifico.upm.es/es/ipublic/researcher/307657 (A. Cimmino); http://usi.to/dte (N. Fornara); https://cosasbuenas.es/ (V. Rodríguez-Doncel); https://kmi.open.ac.uk/people/member/john-domingue (J. Domingue) 0000-0002-1823-4484 (A. Cimmino); 0000-0003-1692-880X (N. Fornara); 0000-0003-1076-2511 (V. Rodríguez-Doncel); Workshop Proceedings
The goal of the first International Workshop on “ODRL and beyond: Practical Applications and challenges for poLicy-base access and usage control” (OPAL2025)1 is to bring together researchers and practitioners interested in the scientific, technological, and practical aspects and challenges in implementing systems to control policy-based access to and use of online data and resources.
Indeed empowering individuals and organisations to share data responsibly and eficiently has become a critical challenge in today’s digital landscape. Over the past few years, various standards, descriptive languages, and technologies have emerged to address this need, enabling greater control, transparency, and interoperability in data-sharing practices. Among these, the Open Digital Rights Language (ODRL) is the W3C language to represent policies related to permissions, prohibitions, and obligations in various data-usage and digital rights management scenarios. ODRL 2.2 has a core Information Model2 and a Core and Common Vocabulary3 specified using Semantic Web technologies.
In recent years, significant eforts have been dedicated to enforcing and evaluating ODRL policies, moving from theoretical exploration to practical implementations. This progress is exemplified by the recognition of ODRL as a recommended standard for building data spaces as discussed by the International Data Spaces Association, Gaia-X, or FIWARE, as a road to European digital sovereignty.
However, while ODRL has proven valuable for establishing rights management frameworks, several questions remain regarding its real-world application and the challenges associated with practical use LGOBE CEUR
ceur-ws.org cases. The workshop aimed to gather researchers, practitioners, and stakeholders to share practical experiences, innovative applications, and lessons learned from using ODRL in diverse scenarios.
The workshop was held in conjunction with the 22nd Extended Semantic Web Conference (ESWC 2025) in Portorož, Slovenia, on 1st June, 2025. The workshop received 11 submissions, of which 8 were accepted as regular papers for publication in the proceedings and 3 as poster/demo papers. 2. Chairs 3. Program Committee
We are very grateful to our keynote speaker as well as to all the OPAL 2025 participants who took part in the discussions. We thank all the members of the Program Committee for their hard work and the workshop chairs for the organization. We also thank EasyChair for the use of their conference management system. This event has been partially supported by: the Madrid Government (Comunidad de Madrid-Spain) under the Multiannual Agreement 2023-2026 with the Universidad Politécnica de Madrid in Line A, Emerging PhD researchers through the project GUIA (M230020126A-AJCA). This research has also been supported by European Union’s Horizon Europe research and innovation programme under the Marie Sklodowska-Curie grant agreement No 101169409 (HARNESS).