DEVELOPMENT VERSION: This is an experimental DALICC environment. Features, data and APIs may change or be reset without notice. A stable version of this service, with a potentially different feature set, will be made available soon at dalicc.net.

2026

About

DALICC stands for Data Licenses Clearance Center. It turns the terms of a license into a machine readable model, so that a program can work out what a license permits, what it requires, and whether two licenses can be combined in one derivative work. It is a tool for understanding licenses. It does not replace legal advice, and the association gives no warranty for what it reports.

The platform is operated by the association DALICC - Verein zur Förderung der Rechtssicherheit in der Datenbewirtschaftung (ZVR 1249185710). University of Applied Sciences St. Pölten (USTP) led the research project DALICC grew out of. Legal supervision under the auspices of LPA Law. The technical infrastructure is hosted at USTP.

For questions, corrections, or account requests, contact Tassilo Pellegrini (tassilo.pellegrini@ustp.at) or Giray Havur (giray.havur@ustp.at).

What you can do here

  • License Library: curated, machine readable models of standard licenses. Every license also has a page you can read: the permissions, duties and prohibitions it states, its clause texts and its version history, with downloads in JSON-LD, Turtle and RDF/XML.
  • License Search: a questionnaire over actions, duties and asset types that narrows the library down to the licenses that fit your case.
  • License Composer: build a custom license from the same vocabulary, run a consistency check on it and publish it under its own address.
  • License Compatibility Checker and License Comparator: check a bundle of licenses for conflicts, optionally against a target license, and read the conflicting statements side by side.
  • Dependency graphs: the axioms the reasoning is based on. They say how the actions of a license relate to one another. You can read them and edit them, because they are data rather than code.
  • Text-to-License: a translation assistant that drafts a model from the plain text of a license. What comes back is a draft for review, with the quoted evidence for every statement. It never publishes a license of its own accord.
  • License-to-Text: the other direction. It reads a license model and writes the license out in plain English, section by section, and says which terms of the model no section covered. That text is a draft too, and it changes nothing.
  • The API and a Python client: everything the website does is a documented HTTP operation, and the dalicc package wraps it for use in a pipeline.

The service is experimental. Its output is not legal advice and should not be reused as such. In case of doubt consult your legal advisor.

Take part

  • Report a wrong or missing license model, or propose a new one: use the correction request and submission forms on a license page when you are signed in, or write to us at the two addresses above.
  • Read the code, open an issue or send a pull request: github.com/dalicc.
  • Ask a question, ask for an account, or report a missing or wrong entry on the publications page: the contact form or the same two addresses.

Licensing

  • Code (API backend, website, reasoner, scripts): AGPL-3.0-only. A commercial license is available from the association for use that AGPL-3.0-only does not fit. Ask at either address above.
  • Python client (the dalicc package and its command line tool): Apache-2.0.
  • License data (license library, dependency graphs, vocabulary): CC-BY-4.0, as declared inside the RDF itself. Credit it as: DALICC License Library, DALICC - Verein zur Förderung der Rechtssicherheit in der Datenbewirtschaftung, https://dalicc.net, CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). A license a record describes belongs to its publisher; the record is a model of it, not the license itself.
  • Site content (these pages and the blog): not relicensed, the rights remain with their authors and the association.

Project history

2016 to 2019: the research project

DALICC began as a research project funded by the Austrian Research Promotion Agency (FFG) under the programme "IKT der Zukunft", 4th call (2015). It ran from 1 November 2016 to 31 March 2019, coordinated by Tassilo Pellegrini at USTP, University of Applied Sciences St. Pölten, with the Vienna University of Economics and Business (Axel Polleres, Sabrina Kirrane), the University of Innsbruck and STI International (Anna Fensel), the law firm Höhne, In der Maur & Partner Rechtsanwälte OG (Markus Dörfler) and the Semantic Web Company GmbH (Martin Kaltenböck) as partners. [1] [2]

The project defined the information model (a license as an ODRL set of permissions, duties and prohibitions), the dependency graph that says how actions relate, and the four modules the framework is still built around: library, composer, annotator and negotiator.

2019 to 2021: a public service

After the project ended, the library and the reasoning were published as a web service. The architecture behind it was presented at SEMANTiCS 2021 as "DALICC As A Service: A Scaleable Architecture for License Clearance". [3]

2021 to 2023: community, open source and the association

In netidee Call 16 (2021) the Internet Foundation Austria funded the step from prototype to an operated, open service, and awarded DALICC the special prize for "Data Understanding". [4] [5] The funded work ran from 2022 to its final report in October 2023.

An association was set up to carry the open source programme and to give the community from business and science an organisational home. [6] It appeared publicly for the first time in September 2022, when Tassilo Pellegrini, Giray Havur and Sebastian Neumaier held the first DALICC tutorial at SEMANTiCS 2022 in Vienna under the affiliation "DALICC Association". [7] The association was founded on 17 June 2022 and is registered under ZVR 1249185710.

In October 2022 DALICC joined the DBpedia Association. [8] [9] A second tutorial followed at SEMANTiCS 2023 in Leipzig. [10] In December 2023 the framework, its services and the license data were released as open source on GitHub. [11] DALICC license identifiers are used by other platforms, among them the DBpedia Databus. [11]

2024 to 2025

The framework was presented to the wider open source compliance community, for example in the OpenChain Reference Tooling working group at Bitkom in March 2024. [12]

On 4 November 2025 the host institution changed its name: Fachhochschule St. Pölten became Hochschule für Angewandte Wissenschaften St. Pölten, with the English name USTP, University of Applied Sciences St. Pölten. [13]

2026: the platform renewal

The 2026 renewal rebuilds the website inside the API service and adds what the 2022 roadmap left open. Accounts arrive by invitation, and every license has an owner who can share it. Every license model, the dependency graph and the vocabulary keep an immutable version history, and the dependency graphs themselves became editable. On top of that come a review workflow with submissions, correction requests and messaging, the two assistants that translate between a license text and its model, and a Python client. The documentation describes each of these.

Sources

Every dated statement above was checked against a public page. The checks were made on 16 September 2026.

  1. FFG project database, project "DALICC", programme "IKT der Zukunft, IKT der Zukunft - 4. Ausschreibung (2015)", 01.11.2016 to 31.03.2019: https://projekte.ffg.at/projekt/1714460
  2. USTP research portal, project page "DALICC: Data Licenses Clearance Center": https://research.ustp.at/en/projects/dalicc-data-licenses-clearance-center
  3. CEUR-WS Vol-2941, paper 12, SEMANTiCS 2021 posters and demos: https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-2941/
  4. netidee project page "DALICC", Call 16, funding year 2021: https://www.netidee.at/dalicc
  5. netidee, "Das sind die neuen Geförderten von Call 16!", special prize "Data Understanding": https://www.netidee.at/node/1916
  6. netidee project blog, "Digital rights clearance made easy", 3 June 2022: https://www.netidee.at/dalicc/digital-rights-clearance-made-easy
  7. SEMANTiCS 2022 EU, tutorial "License Clearance made easy with the Open DALICC Framework", 13 September 2022: https://2022-eu.semantics.cc/license-clearance-made-easy-open-dalicc-framework
  8. netidee project blog, "DALICC is now member of the DBpedia Association", 28 October 2022: https://www.netidee.at/dalicc/dalicc-now-member-dbpedia-association
  9. DBpedia Association member page for DALICC: https://www.dbpedia.org/dbpedia-members/dalicc/
  10. netidee project blog, "Join our tutorial in Leipzig in September 2023!", 17 May 2023: https://www.netidee.at/dalicc/join-our-tutorial-leipzig-september-2023
  11. netidee project blog, "Die Software und Daten des DALICC Frameworks nun unter Open Source Lizenz verfügbar", 12 December 2023: https://www.netidee.at/dalicc/et-voila-das-dalicc-framework-nun-frei-verfuegbar
  12. USTP Institute for Innovation Systems, talks of Tassilo Pellegrini, "License Clearance made easy with the Open DALICC Framework", Bitkom OpenChain Reference Tooling working group, 7 March 2024: https://iis.ustp.at/team/tassilo-pellegrini
  13. USTP, "New name, same strong values", 4 November 2025: https://www.ustp.at/en/stories/news/fh-st-poelten-is-now-ustp