arXiv subjects

Christoph Quix

Publications and source records attributed to Christoph Quix.

8 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

What Does ODRL Mean? A Cross-Level Ontological Grounding of Permissions, Prohibitions, and Duties in UFO-L

ODRL policy evaluators produce verdicts, but say nothing about the normative positions a policy brings into existence, the authority structures those positions presuppose, or who holds the power to declare a norm violated. We formulate the Cross-Level Design Principle: any normative language with violable, consequential norms requires both conduct-level positions (Permission, Duty, Right, No right) and competence-level positions (Power, Subjection, Immunity, Disability). Applying this to ODRL, we establish that prohibition is sanctioned (violation possible and consequential), that permission is underspecified across its behaviour parameter (open vs. closed world), and that the formal semantics covers achievement obligations only. We ground ODRL in UFO-L, mapping each activated rule to a simple legal relator and extending coverage from two to eight legal positions; violation-declaration authority, implicit in every existing evaluator, becomes an explicit Power-Subjection pair. All axioms are mechanically verified in Isabelle/HOL and across a 39-problem benchmark under Vampire, E, and Z3.

cs.LO↗

arXiv2026

Sort-Stratified Semantics for Temporal Conflict Detection in ODRL Policies

In the Open Digital Rights Language (ODRL), temporal constraints range over two sorts, instants and durations, but the comparison operators do not distinguish them. The same operator thus means "earlier instant" or "shorter duration," leaving conflict detection between two policies unsound. We resolve this by sort stratification: each temporal operand is typed to one of two ordered domains, points in time or amounts of time. Each constraint then denotes an interval, and conflict reduces to interval comparison under a three-valued verdict (Conflict, Compatible, Unknown). We characterise the check's decidability across a static and a runtime fragment, prove it sound, and evaluate it on a benchmark of policy problems compiled to TPTP and SMT-LIB, available as an artefact.

cs.LO↗

arXiv2026

Data Architectures and their Technical Requirements (DATER)

Modern organizations generate and consume massive volumes of heterogeneous data at high speed. This requires a continuous development of new techniques for more efficient and reliable data management. Designing appropriate data architectures has therefore become a strategic necessity, as they shape how data is integrated, governed, and made available for analytics and decisionmaking. This paper introduces a conceptual framework - Data Architectures and their Technical Requirements (DATER) - to systematically describe and evaluate data architectures based on technical requirements. Six modern architectures are examined: data warehouse, (semantic) data lake, data lakehouse, data fabric, and data mesh. Each is analyzed by historical context, defining features, and conformance to DATER dimensions. The study supports researchers and practitioners in navigating architectural paradigms, clarifying overlaps, and highlighting strengths, limitations, and use-case suitability.

cs.DB↗

arXiv2026

Axis-Aligned Semantics for ODRL: Resolving Dimensional Ambiguity in Policy Constraints

The Open Digital Rights Language (ODRL) represents policy constraints as triples of a left operand, an operator, and a value. Several spatial operands, however, range over multi-axis domains such as width, height, and depth, while the constraint syntax provides no explicit axis identity. As a result, policy engines cannot determine whether multiple constraints apply to the same axis or different ones, making conflict detection unsound or incomplete. We resolve this ambiguity by axis decomposition, replacing multi-axis operands with axis-specific scalar operands over totally ordered domains. Each constraint then denotes an interval per axis and each policy an axis-aligned box, reducing conflict detection to box comparison. We define a three-valued semantics (Conflict, Compatible, Unknown), prove the decomposition sound and backward compatible with ODRL, instantiate it as ODRL Axis-Aligned Profile (OAAP), and validate it on a benchmark of 256 ODRL policy problems, each expressed in Turtle and compiled to first-order (TPTP) and SMT-LIB form, using Vampire, E, Z3, and cvc5.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2026

Denotational Semantics for ODRL: Knowledge-Based Constraint Conflict Detection

ODRL's six set-based operators -- isA, isPartOf, hasPart, isAnyOf, isAllOf, isNoneOf -- depend on external domain knowledge that the W3C specification leaves unspecified. Without it, every cross-dataspace policy comparison defaults to Unknown. We present a denotational semantics that maps each ODRL constraint to the set of knowledge-base concepts satisfying it. Conflict detection reduces to denotation intersection under a three-valued verdict -- Conflict, Compatible, or Unknown -- that is sound under incomplete knowledge. The framework covers all three ODRL composition modes (and, or, xone) and all three semantic domains arising in practice: taxonomic (class subsumption), mereological (part-whole containment), and nominal (identity). For cross-dataspace interoperability, we define order-preserving alignments between knowledge bases and prove two guarantees: conflicts are preserved across different KB standards, and unmapped concepts degrade gracefully to Unknown -- never to false conflicts. A runtime soundness theorem ensures that design-time verdicts hold for all execution contexts. The encoding stays within the decidable EPR fragment of first-order logic. We validate it with 154 benchmarks across six knowledge base families (GeoNames, ISO 3166, W3C DPV, a GDPR-derived taxonomy, BCP 47, and ISO 639-3) and four structural KBs targeting adversarial edge cases. Both the Vampire theorem prover and the Z3 SMT solver agree on all 154 verdicts. A key finding is that exclusive composition (xone) requires strictly stronger KB axioms than conjunction or disjunction: open-world semantics blocks exclusivity even when positive evidence appears to satisfy exactly one branch.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2025

From Instructions to ODRL Usage Policies: An Ontology Guided Approach

This study presents an approach that uses large language models such as GPT-4 to generate usage policies in the W3C Open Digital Rights Language ODRL automatically from natural language instructions. Our approach uses the ODRL ontology and its documentation as a central part of the prompt. Our research hypothesis is that a curated version of existing ontology documentation will better guide policy generation. We present various heuristics for adapting the ODRL ontology and its documentation to guide an end-to-end KG construction process. We evaluate our approach in the context of dataspaces, i.e., distributed infrastructures for trustworthy data exchange between multiple participating organizations for the cultural domain. We created a benchmark consisting of 12 use cases of varying complexity. Our evaluation shows excellent results with up to 91.95% accuracy in the resulting knowledge graph.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2023

Semantic Data Management in Data Lakes

In recent years, data lakes emerged as away to manage large amounts of heterogeneous data for modern data analytics. One way to prevent data lakes from turning into inoperable data swamps is semantic data management. Some approaches propose the linkage of metadata to knowledge graphs based on the Linked Data principles to provide more meaning and semantics to the data in the lake. Such a semantic layer may be utilized not only for data management but also to tackle the problem of data integration from heterogeneous sources, in order to make data access more expressive and interoperable. In this survey, we review recent approaches with a specific focus on the application within data lake systems and scalability to Big Data. We classify the approaches into (i) basic semantic data management, (ii) semantic modeling approaches for enriching metadata in data lakes, and (iii) methods for ontologybased data access. In each category, we cover the main techniques and their background, and compare latest research. Finally, we point out challenges for future work in this research area, which needs a closer integration of Big Data and Semantic Web technologies.

cs.DB↗

arXiv2023

Data Lakes: A Survey of Functions and Systems

Data lakes are becoming increasingly prevalent for big data management and data analytics. In contrast to traditional 'schema-on-write' approaches such as data warehouses, data lakes are repositories storing raw data in its original formats and providing a common access interface. Despite the strong interest raised from both academia and industry, there is a large body of ambiguity regarding the definition, functions and available technologies for data lakes. A complete, coherent picture of data lake challenges and solutions is still missing. This survey reviews the development, architectures, and systems of data lakes. We provide a comprehensive overview of research questions for designing and building data lakes. We classify the existing approaches and systems based on their provided functions for data lakes, which makes this survey a useful technical reference for designing, implementing and deploying data lakes. We hope that the thorough comparison of existing solutions and the discussion of open research challenges in this survey will motivate the future development of data lake research and practice.

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