Towards an Ontology-Based Solution for Managing License Agreement Using Semantic Desktop

摘要

Whenever software is installed on a computer system, one has to agree to the end-user license agreement. The software license agreement grants licensee certain rights in software usage, but usually the ownership rights of the software stays with licensor. The licensor may also hold the right to restrict the usage of the software and can revoke the agreement if the licensee violates the license terms. Without agreeing with the license terms and conditions, the end-user is not authorized to use the software and could face penalties as described in the law. The main problem is that the percentage of the users who actually read the end-user license agreement which are almost incomprehensible for the average software user is very low. Mostly the end-user does not pay much attention to reading the license agreement because they believe that nearly all the end-user license agreements are practically the same. This misunderstanding makes them not fully read the agreement and just scroll the agreement and accept the terms and conditions. What they do not realize is that by breaking the license agreement they could be confronted with some penalties as described in the law. To overcome the problem of human inefficiency of understanding the license agreement, we have introduced a machine readable representation of the license agreement based on Semantic Web Technologies.