Heuristics for Licenses Composition

The Web of Data is assisting to a growth of interest with respect to the open challenge of representing and reasoning in an automated way over licenses and copyright. In this paper, we deal with the problem of checking the composing together a set of licensing terms associated to a single query result on the Web of Data to create a so called composite license. More precisely, we analyze two composition heuristics, AND-composition and OR-composition, showing how they can be used to combine the deontic components specified by the licenses, i.e., permissions, obligations, and prohibitions, and which are the most suitable combinations depending on the starting licenses. Such heuristics are evaluated using the SPINdle logic reasoner.