W3C is pleased to announce the report from the W3C Workshop on the Future of ODRL, held in July 2026 in London, UK, and online.
Bringing together participants from standards organizations, industry, academia and the broader policy, data and rights communities, the workshop covered media, core semantics, banking and finance, data spaces, legal and regulatory applications, and new language features. It was explicitly positioned as a turning point for ODRL.
The emerging vision is considerably broader than simply producing another revision of the ODRL vocabulary. There was consensus to establish a new W3C ODRL Working Group set to work on ODRL 3.0 as a foundation for machine-readable, interoperable and increasingly machine-actionable policies, capable of operating across sectors and integrating with complementary standards for identity, provenance, legal information, data spaces and digital contracts.
The workshop’s outcomes can be distilled into the following principal recommendations:
- Establish the new W3C ODRL 3.0 Working Group
- Start with use cases and explicit requirements
- Strengthen the formal semantics of ODRL
- Define conformance for policy-processing software
- Develop a comprehensive conformance test suite
- Adopt modular and potentially multi-level conformance
- Improve usability
- Position ODRL as an interoperability layer
- Investigate integration with complementary standards
The workshop's closing discussion confirmed that the workshop chairs would draft a Working Group charter. The intention is to socialize the charter at TPAC 2026 in Dublin, with the objective of moving into the next phase of ODRL 3.0 by the end of 2026.
W3C thanks JP Morgan Chase for hosting the workshop; thanks the Program Committee, the workshop speakers, and all participants for making this event successful.