In order to improve the management of copyright in the Internet, known as Digital Rights Management, there is the need for a shared language for copyright representation. Current approaches are based on purely syntactic solutions, i.e. a grammar that defines a rights expression language. These languages are difficult to put into practise due to the lack of explicit semantics that facilitate its implementation. Moreover, they are simple from the legal point of view because they are intended just to model the usage licenses granted by content providers to end-users. Thus, they ignore the copyright framework that lies behind and the whole value chain from creators to end-users. Our proposal is to use a semantic approach based on semantic web ontologies. We detail the development of a copyright ontology in order to put this approach into practice. It models the copyright core concepts for creation, rights and the basic kinds of actions that operate on content. Altogether, it allows building a copyright framework for the complete value chain. The set of actions operating on content are our smaller building blocks in order to cope with the complexity of copyright value chains and statements and, at the same time, guarantee a high level of interoperability and evolvability. The resulting copyright modelling framework is flexible and complete enough to model many copyright scenarios, not just those related to the economic exploitation of content. The ontology also includes moral rights, so it is possible to model this kind of situations as it is shown in the included example model for a withdrawal scenario. Finally, the ontology design and the selection of tools result in a straightforward implementation. Description Logic reasoners are used for license checking and retrieval. Rights are modelled as classes of actions, action patterns are modelled also as classes and the same is done for concrete actions. Then, to check if some right or license grants an action is reduced to check for class subsumption, which is a direct functionality of these reasoners.

The amount of government information is huge and relies mostly on traditional systems, inaccessible to citizens and often to government departments. In today's digital era, most of this content can be more intelligently processed and integrated within e-government. In the world of the future, where ambient intelligence and e-governments are a reality, citizens will interact with the available services in all areas of their lives; a situation that presents new challenges in the area of Digital Rights Management (DRM). Taking into account the nature of the information and the needs of different governmental departments and citizens, any e-government research must give full attention to DRM. In the process towards successful e-government, properly handling privacy, security and trust is an indispensable precondition for reliable legal safeguards, reliable technology and secure business, and for achieving acceptance by citizens. Therefore, we propose to establish a Network of Excellence (NoE) for a framework for policy, privacy, security, trust and risk management for DRM. The NoE will consist of experts from various disciplines and will conduct and guide on-going and future high quality research on e-government related domains.

Different IT applications require different security services. We have been working in the area of e-health applications in a mobile environment, and we have needed to integrate specific security services. We present those security services for mobile e-health services and how we have implemented them. First, the different security threats specially oriented to the e-health applications are described, like patients' data eavesdropping and manipulation. Afterwards, the different security mechanisms to address these specific security threats are described, e.g. data confidentiality and integrity, together with the restrictions of dynamic IP addresses. Following, the specification of security services requirements and the implementation possibilities to address them in the mobile e-health services are described. As an example of security services integrated into an e-health system, we include the description of the mobile e-health service MobiHealth, an application developed under the MobiHealth project, cofunded by the European Commission (IST-2001-36006), focused on the security services added to it.

Consumers want to use their digital content in the same way they have always used analog content. Consumer associations and governments are starting to request and even impose interoperability between DRM vendors' products. Therefore, interoperability has become a hot topic among content creators and distributors. Digital music providers and even authors are starting to refute the idea thatDRM is an ideal solution for protecting their rights. This is partly due to Apple and Microsoft not making their solutions interoperate.

Digital still images are generated, distributed and stored worldwide at an ever increasing rate. Yet, the large number of available metadata description formats prevents consistent and efficient access to image repositories. Standardized solutions for unifying the access and the retrieval of image repositories are therefore strongly needed. The ISO/IEC SC29 WG1 (more commonly known as JPEG) established the JPSearch project, which aims to standardize interfaces of an abstract image retrieval framework. In this context, the paper introduces our contribution consisting of a reference metadata model, which in combination with the JPEG query format improves interoperable image retrieval for users. Second, a transformation rule declaration language for query reformulation is presented, which contributes to interoperability at the repository side.