The license agreement can be seen as the knowledge
source for a license management system. As such, it may
be referenced by the system each time a new process is initiated.
To facilitate access, a machine readable representation
of the license agreement is highly desirable, but at the
same time we do not want to sacrifice too much readability
of such agreements by human beings. Creating an ontology
as a formal knowledge representation of licensing not only
meets the representation requirements, but also offers improvements
to knowledge reusability owing to the inherent
sharing nature of such representations. Furthermore, the
XML-based ontology languages such as OWL (Web Ontology
Language) can be user friendly for the non-developers
who are often those responsible for implementing and managing
such license agreements. This paper shows our use
of ontology to represent the license agreement in a development
prototype. The ultimate goal is to build ontology
for the license management domain that will facilitate autonomic
knowledge management. Knowledge based on such
ontology can then be shared and utilized by many types of
license management system