Bookmarks, tags, labels and POWDER
Supporting customized search for trust, quality and child protection
Tuesday 13 March 2007
See the video
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Whichever version you watch, you can Follow the slides and read the related (non-technical) white paper.
Stephen Balkam and Phil Archer of the Family Online Safety Institute
The Family Online Safety Institute is a newly created organization that includes the work of the established Internet Content Rating Association (ICRA). The new Institute has four principle pillars, the most relevant of which for this occasion are policy and technology.
CEO Stephen Balkam will open the talk with an overview of the policy issues faced by the online industry today with respect to online safety. This sets the background and gives the motivation for the technical work undertaken.
CTO Phil Archer will then explain why ICRA switched from issuing PICS labels to an RDF-based system, and how the same platform is being used to carry machine-readable trustmarks covering things like accessibility, eCommerce and medical accuracy. This has lead to the creation of a new W3C Working Group, which he chairs called the Protocol for Web Description Resources. Known by it acronym POWDER, the group will improve and standardize the system, with direct relevance to robots.txt, P3P and the new W3C mobileOK trustmark as well child protection.
Part of the group's remit is to produce a definition of a resource grouping method. Resources will be identifiable as being a member or not a member of a group by simple or regular expression-based matching against URIs or portions thereof, property matches and simple listing. The talk will include strawman examples of code for all aspects of the work.
Initial trials are underway of a Google Customised Search Engine that makes use of ICRA labels to offer age-based ratings for search results . This makes use of an as yet small database of ICRA labels that have been human reviewed. The original ICRA label is highly granular declaring whether particular types of nudity are present, sexual content, violence etc. These granular descriptions are converted into an age-based label that is displayed to end users on the CSE.
The medium term aim is to hook up self-applied labels, human verified labels, and trustmarks with user-generated ratings, del.icio.us-style bookmarks etc. to promote the best available content, especially for children. This general approach is explained in a recently published white paper.
