The article formulates the Cross-Level Design Principle to address how ODRL policy evaluators fail to specify normative positions, authority structures, or violation declaration power. It establishes that any normative language with violable norms requires both conduct-level positions like Permission and Duty, and competence-level positions such as Power and Immunity.
- Prohibition is identified as sanctioned, while permission is found to be underspecified across its behavior parameter.
- The formal semantics currently covers only achievement obligations, which the authors extend by mapping ODRL rules to legal relators in UFO-L.
- Coverage of legal positions is expanded from two to eight, making violation-declaration authority an explicit Power-Subjection pair.
- All axioms were mechanically verified in Isabelle/HOL and tested against a 39-problem benchmark using Vampire, E, and Z3.
This grounding provides a more complete ontological framework for ODRL by explicitly defining the normative positions and authority structures that existing evaluators implicitly assume.