IPTC’s Brendan Quinn presented today at the W3C’s Workshop on the Future of ODRL.

The IPTC presentation, “From ACAP to RightsML: the news industry and the future of ODRL”, accompanied a position paper that IPTC recently submitted to the workshop materials.

Quinn’s presentation outlined IPTC’s history with ODRL and machine-readable rights statements over the past 20 years: from collaborating on the Automated Content Access Protocol (ACAP) to its change to be based on ODRL, re-branding to RightsML and re-structuring to become a Profile of ODRL; IPTC’s efforts to make RightsML and ODRL easier to create and use, such as the RightsML Generator and the Simple Rights service; and the current state of adoption in the news industry.

The IPTC presentation went on to demonstrate that while some agencies do use RightsML, some major news providers such as AP, Reuters and dpa handle rights around their content using human-readable text rather than machine-readable markup, and what may be required for these organisations to express rights in RightsML / ODRL.

Presenters detailed positive aspects but also issues and shortcomings with the existing ODRL specification, along with their requests for new features and new tools around the specification.

Other presenters ranged from academia to the banking and finance industry, JPEG Trust, data spaces, scientific data, and of course artificial intelligence aspects to data use.

Full workshop materials will be available to the public via the W3C event website.