Integrated Domain Model for Digital Rights Management

Abstract

Digital Rights Management (DRM) deals with the digital controlling and managing the rights over intellectual property. Recently, it has broadened its scope from content protection to the description, identification, trading, protection, monitoring and tracking of rights over tangible or in-tangible assets. The purpose of this thesis is to define what information is relevant to the DRM domain. Publishers and universities handle masses of copyrights in their publishing and educational activities. These organizations have a strong need for information systems managing copyrights. The problem is that research and development activities are focused on technologies protecting and monitoring content usage in delivery channel. This thesis therefore aid discussion on the requirements for information system capable of performing rights capturing, negotiation and trading tasks. Subject is treated mainly from conceptual-analytical viewpoint and it results in models supporting communication between domain experts and system developers. The most important result of this thesis is an integrated domain model associating existing schemas and ontologies for identifying and describing domain entities. The model is based on extensive analysis on domain characteristics.