ISO 19149:2011

INTERNATIONAL ISO
STANDARD 19149
First edition
2011-11-15
Geographic information — Rights
expression language for geographic
information — GeoREL
Information géographique — Langue sur l'expression des droits pour
l'utilisation de l'information géographique — GeoREL

Reference number
©
ISO 2011
©  ISO 2011
All rights reserved. Unless otherwise specified, no part of this publication may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means,
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ii © ISO 2011 – All rights reserved

Contents Page
Foreword . vi
Introduction . vii
1 Scope . 1
2 Conformance . 1
3 Normative references . 2
4 Terms and definitions . 2
5 Symbols and abbreviated terms . 2
5.1 Abbreviated terms . 2
5.2 Symbols used for common XML namespaces . 3
6 Digital rights management systems . 3
7 Requirements for the expression of digital licenses for geographic resources . 4
8 Geographic rights expression language extensions — GeoREL . 5
8.1 Technical approach . 5
8.2 Spatial entities used in conditions . 6
8.3 Resources . 8
8.3.1 Resources from ISO/IEC 21000 . 8
8.3.2 GeoResource . 8
8.3.3 Data resources: GeoInformation resource metadata . 9
8.3.4 Service resources: GeoProcessing resource metadata . 11
8.4 Principals . 14
8.5 Rights . 15
8.5.1 Usage Rights . 15
8.5.2 Meta-rights . 21
8.6 Conditions . 21
8.6.1 Semantics . 21
8.6.2 Property conditions and grant component patterns . 21
8.6.3 Standards-defined operations . 21
8.6.4 Output conditions . 22
8.6.5 Transfer right and sublicense conditions on meta-rights . 22
8.6.6 Spatial temporal conditions . 23
8.6.7 Layer conditions . 24
8.6.8 Implementation conditions . 24
8.6.9 Parameter range conditions . 24
8.6.10 Derived right conditions . 24
8.6.11 Encoding condition . 25
8.6.12 Side effect and associated conditions . 25
Annex A (normative) Abstract test suite . 27
A.1 The two test cases . 27
A.2 License conformance . 27
A.2.1 Introduction . 27
A.2.2 XML schema conformance . 27
A.2.3 Proper interpretation . 28
A.3 Enforcement conformance . 28
Annex B (normative) geoRel.xsd . 29
Annex C (informative) Notes on the ISO REL, ISO/IEC 21000-5 . 36
C.1 Overview . 36
C.2 License parts .36
C.3 Issuer .37
C.4 For all declaration of variables .37
C.5 Renderer .38
Bibliography .40

Examples and Schemata
Schema 1: GeoPlace . 6
Schema 2: Property and parameter schema . 7
Schema 3: Resource from ISO/IEC 21000 . 8
Schema 4: GeoResource and GeoProcess schema . 9
Example 1: geoResource License . 10
Example 2: geoResource License for a Restricted Area by Name . 12
Example 3: geoProcess License . 13
Example 4: “public user” geoPrincipal defined by functional property . 15
Schema 5: GeoRight . 16
Schema 6: Use . 16
Schema 7: Display . 17
Schema 8: Merge . 17
Schema 9: Extract . 17
Schema 10: Transform . 18
Schema 11: Derive . 18
Schema 12: Edit . 18
Schema 13: Modify . 19
Schema 14: Derive Graphic . 19
Schema 15: Encode . 19
Schema 16: Execute . 20
Example 5: geoProcess used as execute conditions . 20
Schema 17: GeoCondition . 21
Schema 18: Standard compliance conditions . 22
Schema 19: Output format conditions . 22
Schema 20: Transfer conditions . 22
iv © ISO 2011 – All rights reserved

Schema 21: Spatial temporal conditions . 23
Schema 22: Derived right conditions . 24
Schema 23: Encoding conditions . 25
Schema 24: Side Effects . 25
Schema C.1: License Part from ISO REL . 36
Schema C.2: For all variable definition from ISO REL . 37
Example C.1: Property for all elements using “certificate license” from ISO REL . 38
Schema C.3: Renderer from ISO REL, MX extension . 39

Foreword
ISO (the International Organization for Standardization) is a worldwide federation of national standards bodies
(ISO member bodies). The work of preparing International Standards is normally carried out through ISO
technical committees. Each member body interested in a subject for which a technical committee has been
established has the right to be represented on that committee. International organizations, governmental and
non-governmental, in liaison with ISO, also take part in the work. ISO collaborates closely with the
International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) on all matters of electrotechnical standardization.
International Standards are drafted in accordance with the rules given in the ISO/IEC Directives, Part 2.
The main task of technical committees is to prepare International Standards. Draft International Standards
adopted by the technical committees are circulated to the member bodies for voting. Publication as an
International Standard requires approval by at least 75 % of the member bodies casting a vote.
Attention is drawn to the possibility that some of the elements of this document may be the subject of patent
rights. ISO shall not be held responsible for identifying any or all such patent rights.
ISO 19149 was prepared by Technical Committee ISO/TC 211, Geographic information/Geomatics. A base
document was supplied by the Open Geospatial Consortium, Inc.

vi © ISO 2011 – All rights reserved

Introduction
The use of ubiquitous computing in geographic information is often obstructed by legal concerns about the
rights of the holders and owners of data and other intellectual property resources. It can be the case that once
data or other resource is released into any unconstrained and unprotected environment, the value of the
holding is decreased because the underlying data theoretically becomes available from other sources. The
multimedia industry has taken the lead in solving this problem by creating a general model for digital rights
protection, in which a language was developed in order that instances of those rights might be documented, a
rights expression language, specifically in ISO/IEC 21000-5, the ISO REL. This language, used in conjunction
with Digital Rights Management (DRM) systems, can protect the value of data and still allow it to be
distributed subject to a system of licensing, trust and enforcement.
This International Standard extends the ISO REL to encompass the concerns of holders of geographic data
and service resources to equally ensure their protection. This allows the geographic information market to
operate with minimal constraints derived from the need for the protection of intellectual property.
There are two major sources for foundational material for this work.
 The first source is ISO/IEC 21000, a multiple part standard that defines digital rights management in
general. There is no need to extend this basic foundation for expressing and enforcing rights for
resources except in those cases where the special requirements of geographic information and services
make it necessary.
 The second source is ISO 19153 (originally an Open Geospatial Abstract Specification volume), which
enumerates these special cases for geographic information as well as providing an overall reference
model using common geographic information terms that ties the work of the ISO/IEC 21000 work into this
spatial standard.
Given these two foundations, the purpose of this International Standard is to extend the ISO REL, consistent
with the requirements for such extensions given in ISO/IEC 21000-5, to cover the special cases enumerated
in ISO 19153.
INTERNATIONAL STANDARD ISO 19149:2011(E)

Geographic information — Rights expression language for
geographic information — GeoREL
1 Scope
This International Standard defines an XML-based vocabulary or language to express rights for geographic
information in order that digital licenses can be created for such information and related services. This
language, GeoREL, is an extension of the rights expression language in ISO/IEC 21000-5 and is to be used to
compose digital licenses. Each digital license will unambiguously express those particular rights that the
owners (or their agent) of a digital geographic resource extend to the holders of that license. The digital rights
management system in which these licenses are used can then offer ex ante (before the fact) protection for all
such resources.
NOTE The proper use of a GeoREL includes the preservation of rights access by formula expressed in usage
licenses. Thus, data in the public or private domain, when protected, remain in their respective domains if the usage rights
granted so state.
These “rights” are not always covered by copyright law, and are often the result of contracts between
individuals that specify the proper and allowed uses of resources, as opposed to the threat of copyright
litigations which is an ex post facto (after the fact) remediation measure, not an ex ante protection measure.
This International Standard is not a reflection of, or extension of, copyright law.
Mechanisms for the enforcement and preservation of those contract rights are specified in ISO/IEC 21000,
and it is not the intention of this International Standard to replace nor redefine those mechanisms, but to use
them as previously standardized.
2 Conformance
The license language vocabulary is expressed as an XML schema extending the ISO/IEC 21000-5 REL. A
conformant license expression is a well-formed and complete XML document (or its equivalent) that
expresses the semantics described in the standard and that is properly protected from modification by the
mechanisms described and specified in ISO/IEC 21000.
A license compliant to this International Standard will be consistent with the XML schema for ISO/IEC 21000-5
and the XML schema associated with this International Standard (see requirements in Clause 6).
A software system compliant to this International Standard shall interpret any compliant license in a manner
consistent with the semantics expressed in ISO/IEC 21000 and the abstract test suite given in Annex A.
3 Normative references
The following referenced standards are indispensable for the application of this International Standard. For
dated references, only the edition cited applies. For undated references, the latest edition of the referenced
standard (including any amendments) applies.
1)
ISO 19153 , Geospatial Digital Rights Management Reference Model (GeoDRM RM)
ISO/IEC 21000 (all parts), Information technology — Multimedia framework (MPEG-21)
4 Terms and definitions
2)
For the purposes of this document, the terms and definitions given in ISO/IEC 21000 apply .
The terms “constraint” and “condition” are used interchangeably, and no distinction is meant in terms of the
license based on which term is used. This differs from other cases where constraints are expressed as the
contrapositive of conditions.
Following the precedent set in ISO/IEC 21000, the alternative English (Oxford English Dictionary) spelling of
the word license has been used in all instances, except when used in proper names. This is in contradiction to
the ISO 19153, and the preferred English usage, where the word “license” is usually a verb and the word
“licence” is a noun. Both US and UK English dictionaries accept the “s” spellings for the noun, and so this is
not in variance with any current dictionary in either dialect. The basic reason for this is to not confuse the
spelling of the XML elements (which use the ISO/IEC 21000 spellings) with the spellings in the text. No
semantic difference is meant by this typographic convention.
5 Symbols and abbreviated terms
5.1 Abbreviated terms
The following symbols and abbreviated terms are used in this document.
DRM Digital Rights Management
GeoREL Rights Expression Language for Geographic Information (including the ISO REL and the
extension defined in this International Standard)
GeoDRM Digital Rights Management for Geographic Information
ISO REL Rights Expression Language from ISO/IEC 21000-5 (see Annex C for notes on ISO REL)
LBS Location Based Service
REL Rights Expression Language
UDDI Universal Description, Discovery and Integration
URI Uniform Resource Identifier

1) To be published.
2) This International Standard does not include an abstract model. It depends on the models in ISO/IEC 21000 and
ISO 19153.
2 © ISO 2011 – All rights reserved

WFS Web Feature Service (ISO 19142)
WSDL Web Services Definition Language
XML Extensible Markup Language
5.2 Symbols used for common XML namespaces
The following namespace prefixes are used in the in-text XML and XML Schema fragments:
grm Namespace prefix for the geoRel.xsd license extensions
xsd Namespace prefix for the XML Schema basic types, used in defining schema elements
r Namespace prefix for rel-r.xsd in ISO/IEC 21000, representing the namespace
urn:mpeg:mpeg21:2003:01-REL-R-NS
sx Namespace prefix for rel-sx.xsd in ISO/IEC 21000, representing the namespace
urn:mpeg:mpeg21:2003:01-REL-SX-NS
mx Namespace prefix for rel-mx.xsd in ISO/IEC 21000, representing the namespace
urn:mpeg:mpeg21:2003:01-REL-MX-NS
Examples in this International Standard are given as informative illustrations of ideas, and are not valid
licenses, since they lack the appropriate signature values that would allow them to be recognized by a
qualified security system as well-formed. Other than the absence of signature keys, the fragments are valid, in
the sense that within a properly signed license document, they would be valid and correctly parsed and
interpreted if correctly placed in the larger context of a license. They do conform to the XML schemas using
the above namespace prefixes, unless abbreviated elements are used, and in those cases, the abbreviations
are noted in the text, or in the use of ellipsis marks (…) between opening and closing element tags.
To make the requirements expressed in this International Standard easier to find, normative statements
specifying either requirements or recommendations have been presented in a bold font.
6 Digital rights management systems
This International Standard is written within the model defined in ISO 19153 and within the model defined in
ISO/IEC 21000, including all of its parts. The license structure is defined in ISO/IEC 21000-5 and this
International Standard only addresses the extension of that license format for the purpose of creating a
licensing vocabulary for geographic resources, both data and services, using as much of the existing
ISO/IEC 21000-defined framework as possible. An informative description of the entire MPEG-21 systems as
[6]
defined in ISO/IEC 21000 is given in The MPEG-21 Book cited in the Bibliography.
For this purpose, this International Standard defines extensions only to license parts appearing in grants as
defined by ISO/IEC 21000-5 and whose semantics are described in ISO 19153. All security, principal identity,
and generic resource descriptions and identity descriptions remain as defined in ISO/IEC 21000.
In all cases, licenses valid under this International Standard shall be consistent with the schema given
in Annex B and those schemas imported by it, and shall carry a valid digital signature of the resource
owner or of one of the owner's recognized agents.
A software system compliant to this International Standard shall interpret any compliant license in a
manner consistent with the semantics expressed in ISO/IEC 21000 and this International Standard.
These dependencies on ISO/IEC 21000 and ISO 19153 provide the context for this International Standard.
ISO/IEC 21000 provides a general system description for digital rights management, license construction and
interpretation, and covers the security techniques that make such systems feasible. ISO 19153 provides a
reference model including those items in the realm of geographic information that require the protection of a
licensing system. The extension to the ISO REL as presented in this International Standard is where these
two dependencies interact. ISO/IEC 21000 gives requirements for the mechanism for extending the ISO REL
and ISO 19153 provides the semantics for those same extensions.
7 Requirements for the expression of digital licenses for geographic resources
A license in a rights expression language has as its major component a sequence of grants which specifies
which individuals (represented by principals) may commit which acts (represented by rights) against which
items (represented as resources) under which circumstances (represented by conditions). Within an ISO REL
grant (XML element r:grant; see Figure 1), these four types of items are specified in the following order,
including:
1) Principal – the parties to whom the licensed right is granted, the licensee;
2) Rights – the act or actions covered by the rights licensed by this grant;
3) Resources – the items to be licensed, and hence to which rights are granted;
4) Conditions – conditions on any parts specific to this grant.
Descriptive terms associated with resources, rights and principals because of their geographic nature are
needed in the license extension defined by this International Standard. These terms are given in geoCondition
elements, using references to the described Principal, Right or Resource using standard ISO/IEC 21000-5
mechanisms. The most obvious requirements deal with geographic constraints within a database resource.
Less obvious, but just as important, is the description of geographic processing resources or services that
may be associated in particular or in kind to other resources.
These descriptions can link across multiple licenses to create behaviours of the licensing system as required.
EXAMPLE
 A license can be given to each emergency management professional for a given area as proof of his status.
 A license can be associated with each data or service resource that gives emergency management professionals
access to use the resource but triggers a side effect that records that access.
 In an emergency, the emergency management professional can use his “proof of status” license to gain access to the
resources in the group above.
This is a simple implementation strategy for a “break the glass” use of normally restricted data by authorized
personnel.
Since the actions against these types of resources cannot be defined completely within the purview of
multimedia, the rights associated with geographic data and processing resources require further description
within a geo-license than they would in a baseline ISO/IEC 21000 license.
With new actions (rights) and geographic resources, the conditions placed on grants require more description
to fully meet the need of the geographic information and processing communities. Conditions describe how
the license part is constrained, using the property or Boolean expression that needs to be matched by that
part.
The other parts of a license, including the security specifications and identification, are not affected by the
association of geographic properties to the licensed resources, rights, conditions and principals involved in the
community. In many cases, useful licenses for geographic resources may confine themselves to the dialect of
an ISO/IEC 21000-5 compliant license. These other parts include the identity of the license issuer, also a
principal, who shall be an agent (through a “chain of agency”, see ISO 19153) of the owner of the resource.
The additional information associated with the issuer is verification information that “digitally signs” the license
as an XML document, which proves the identity of the issuer as the signatory, and the license document's
“unmodified” state from the time of the signature. The mechanism is defined in ISO/IEC 21000-5 and uses
“Digital Signatures” for XML documents.
4 © ISO 2011 – All rights reserved

License
Grant
Principal
Right
Resource
Condition
Issuer
Signature
Details
Figure 1 — Structure of a license from ISO/IEC 21000-5
8 Geographic rights expression language extensions — GeoREL
8.1 Technical approach
The licenses produced by the MPEG 21/ISO/IEC 21000 REL are designed to work within a security system
that can enforce to the extent legally and feasibly possible the conditions of a legal contract, the legal version
of the license between supplier and user. It is not the intent of this International Standard to supplant this
system, but to extend the parts that describe the granting of license rights to include geographic data and
processing resources to take advantage of those same security features.
Further, the license structure is constrained by the semantics of its interpretation as given in the description of
authorization presented in ISO/IEC 21000-5. This interpretation is not always “obvious” to the uninformed
reader of the license. A digital license, even when written in an unencrypted XML format, would not be
expected to be interpretable by anyone unless they are conversant with the authorization algorithms and
element semantics described in ISO/IEC 21000.
The public users should never be encouraged to read an XML license in order to understand their
contract. Licenses published in unencrypted form should carry a caveat that expresses this concern,
and refers the user back to the legally binding contract, or other “plain text” explanation of the
meaning of the license.
The general approach is to extend the principal, right, resource and conditions of the ISO REL to include
geometric properties. To ensure that the baseline functions of the ISO REL are preserved, these extensions
have been made by using conditions within the license to describe, and thereby restrict, these entities.
The patterns used in the following clauses follow one of the following abstract structures:
GeoResource implements Resource
Sequence
(
Resource
)
GeoCondition implements Condition
Sequence
(
License Part  usually by reference or variable
Service   service to calculate the conditions if needed
Boolean statement or condition to match by the License Part
)
In each specific property to be used in conditions defined below, and in specifications using this
International Standard as a base, care should be taken to completely define and understand the
semantics of the property so that there is no ambiguity in license processing by the GateKeeper as
defined in ISO 19153. The validity of actions with respect to a license is defined in ISO/IEC 21000-5 (with the
geographic interpretation of conditions supplied by ISO 19153).
When properly interpreted by conformant “gatekeeper” software, a valid license shall always allow
actions valid under the license, and shall always disallow actions not valid under the license.
For continuity of the narrative, the semantics of terms from the references are often included in the text of this
International Standard. If this semantics text is different from the ISO 19153 text or the ISO/IEC 21000
text, the base standard text takes precedence and should be considered the primary source of the
normative semantics of the terms used.
8.2 Spatial entities used in conditions
A common entity used in conditions is a geographic place specified by geometry, name or other text, such as
an address or telephone number that can be associated with a place. Most of these names would be included
in an ISO-compliant gazetteer or similar data store available to the license GateKeeper.
Geometry to express geographic location requires information on coordinate system and mechanisms for
interpretation. A geoPlace element uses GML geometry elements, defined in ISO 19136, to properly describe
such geometry as needed. GeoPlace is essentially a data-type that can be used to realize
SI_LocationInstance from ISO 19112 or AD_AbstractAddress from ISO 19133. Schema 1 gives an XML
Schema description of these elements. This and all other schema examples in this International Standard are
combined in a full XML schema document (geoRel.xsd) given in Annex B.
Schema 1: GeoPlace



GeoPlace is a named place, described elsewhere in some gazetteer. This
allows the license to avoid large coordinate strings, and makes the
license more readable











minOccurs="0"/>










6 © ISO 2011 – All rights reserved

The place may be presented as either an element value of geometry or as a “placeName” attribute value,
usually either well-known or linked to some sort of gazetteer where its limits may be found. Further, an
Address structure can be used. The pattern for address is taken from ISO/IEC 21000-5 and parallels the
similar structure in ISO 19133. It can be extended for local use in the same manner as done in r:territory in the
ISO REL.
NOTE Other text used as place names, such as telephone numbers, would be included as a placeName attribute
value, and a gazetteer describing their semantics would be included.
In cases where geometry is included, the placeName and gazetteer may be ignored. The local geometry
description should take precedent over the implied extent of the place name from the gazetteer
service (ISO 19112). These redundant location expressions should be consistent with the location
expressed in the geometry.
In general, properties and parameters are used in conditions to restrict license parts based on conditions. The
only difference between a parameter and a property is that a parameter shall have a name, usually referring to
a name used in a properly formatted service request, but potentially using a WSDL (or similar) offset such as
“wsdl-4” which would be the 4th parameter in the description of a WSDL structure as specified in the
parameterOrder attribute of the operation element (2.4.6 Parameter Order within an

Operation http://www.w3.org/TR/wsdl#_parameter) in the WSDL description – see References [9], [10], [11]
and [12] in the Bibliography. The use of WSDL offsets is consistent with the expression of service calls in
conditions as expressed in ISO/IEC 21000 licenses for such items as “tracking” services (defined in
ISO 19133). Schema 2 gives the basic structure of properties and parameters to be used in expressing
geoCondition elements.
Schema 2: Property and parameter schema



Properties are descriptions of any item in a licence. The only
current restriction is that they shall have a name, a description
and a value from this namespace.



default="urn:ogc:geodrm:properties"/>

















substitutionGroup="grm:property"/>


8.3 Resources
8.3.1 Resources from ISO/IEC 21000
The geographic rights expression language extensions – GeoREL – define only a limited number of
extensions to the ISO REL as defined in ISO/IEC 21000-5. Where possible, GeoREL uses element definitions
directly from the ISO REL as originally intended; for example, GeoREL uses the r:resource element from the
ISO REL to identify resources. Schema 3 quotes from the ISO/IEC 21000 schemas of the root type for
resource.
Schema 3: Resource from ISO/IEC 21000





substitutionGroup="r:licensePart"/>

NOTE The r:resource element in ISO REL is “conceptually abstract”, meaning that if it is used in a license, it will not
contain information about the resource, but contain a reference to another element or variable which defined it.

8.3.2 GeoResource
Resources not fully describable in ISO/IEC 21000 are expressed as geoResource or geoProcess elements.
Both of these elements contain an ISO/IEC 21000 resource element and thus may potentially have two
“logically equivalent” values for the licensePartID defined in the r:licensePart element. Care should be taken
to use the attribute of the geoResource or geoProcess element in preference to the one of the
embedded resource, since substitution in references follow the licensePartID value and may result in
invalid licenses if the value leads to the embedded resource as opposed to the container. This is
especially true for the geoProcess elements, which can be granted licenses (as principals) for conformance to
standards, which is not the case for all of the possible embedded resource types. When using
geoResources in a GeoREL license, where the resources are processes or potentially parameter
values for other geographic processes, the license should use either geoResource or geoProcess
elements to prevent confusion on execute rights which may involve both, and thus the license will
need to distinguish between resources playing the role of process and those playing the role of
parameter.
From the resource base type in the ISO REL, the geoResource structures are defined in Schema 4.
8 © ISO 2011 – All rights reserved

Schema 4: GeoResource and GeoProcess schema












use="optional"/>
use="optional"/>



substitutionGroup="r:principal"/>

substitutionGroup="grm:geoResource"/>

NOTE The substitution group for r:principal is included by the ISO REL in the group for r:resource. The usage above
(putting a resource into the principal substitution group) allows geoResources to hold licenses for proof of conformance
while still being in the substitution group for r:resource and thus being able to play the part of the resource in any r:grant
element.
The use of “minOccurs=0” in the r:resource component above is required by ISO/IEC 21000-5 and is intended to allow
licenses to refer to groups of resources by their license Part ID or a variable reference alone, as required by
ISO/IEC 21000. In some cases, the geoResource element may be a free variable whose domain is restricted by an r:forAll
element or by conditions in the same grant or grant group.
From this type and element definition, a GeoResource is like any other resource, but can have licenses
(because it is also a principal) and geographically specific properties in geoCondition elements to further
restrict it.
8.3.3 Data resources: GeoInformation resource metadata
The above schema fragment is sufficient to define digital data resources as in this simplified example
(expressed as a license document), as in Example 1. This document would be a valid license if and only if the
URI references and the signature it contained were valid. For information on the digital signature process to
determine these values for a particular license and issuer, see ISO/IEC 21000-5.
Example 1: geoResource License
xmlns:mx="urn:mpeg:mpeg21:2003:01-REL-MX-NS"
xmlns:dsig="http://www.w3.org/2000/09/xmldsig#"
xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
xmlns:gml="http://www.opengis.net/gml" xsi:schemaLocation="urn:ogc:geodrm geo-
rel.xsd" >