Licensing Services: Formal Analysis and Implementation

The distribution of services spanning across organizational boundaries raises problems related to intellectual value that are less explored in service oriented research. Being a way to manage the rights between service consumers and service providers, licenses are critical to be considered in services. As the nature of services differs significantly from traditional software and components, services prevent the direct adoption of software and component licenses. For drafting a family of machine readable licenses, the clauses of a service license should be unambiguous. We propose a formalisation of licensing clauses specific to services for unambiguous definition of a license. We extend Open Digital Rights Language to implement the clauses of service licensing, making a service license compatible with all the existing service standards.