Formally Grounded ODRL Evaluator Enhances Data Policy Compliance

The ODRL policy language is becoming a de-facto standard for modeling data access, usage preferences, and AI governance policies, particularly within European dataspaces. However, the current standard lacks formal mathematical semantics to guide the implementation of policy evaluation, leading to inconsistencies across different systems and tools. This variability limits interoperability and prevents guaranteed consistent results. Building on an existing semantic model of ODRL, researchers have formalized the challenges of ODRL evaluation for both access control and monitoring scenarios, applicable to static and streaming data. They present a novel, efficient algorithm and its implementation, creating the first ODRL Evaluator with transparent formal semantics that supports all rule types. Experimental performance measurements analyze scalability across policy complexity and data size. A comparative review of existing ODRL evaluators highlights the distinct differences in supported features and evaluation modes, underscoring the unique contributions of this formally grounded approach.