From Access Control to Usage Control with User-Managed Access
Existing Web data storage platforms struggle to meet the demands of decentralized, semantically rich, and legally compliant data usage control. This work proposes a novel approach that integrates the User-Managed Access (UMA) authorization framework with the W3C Open Digital Rights Language (ODRL) policy language to replace Solid’s native access control mechanism, thereby decoupling authorization from storage. For the first time within the Solid ecosystem, this integration advances access control from mere permission management toward legally aware usage control. The authors also design a policy evaluation mechanism tailored for non-standardized semantic environments. A prototype implementation demonstrates that the proposed method maintains compatibility with Solid while enabling flexible, interoperable, and legally aligned data governance.