FOSI Comment on the SIP-Bench Synthesis Report

In December 2007, The European Commission published its "2007 Benchmark of tools to filter potentially harmful Internet content."¹ FOSI welcomes the report which is a through study of filtering solutions available today and how they are viewed by parents and children.

The section "Peeking Into the Future" is particularly interesting for FOSI. Under the sub-heading, "A call to involve end-users for more fine-grained classification", the report makes the following assertions:

The ICRA concept requires that:

The classification is done by a dedicated organisation long after the content is produced;

The content providers tag their content;

Content gets a single label: good or not good for a certain age.

Two of these points need to be corrected.

Firstly, as currently presented, it is the content provider him/herself that labels the content, not a "dedicated organisation." Secondly, there is not a single label, rather, an ICRA label declares the presence or absence of 43 different content types meaning that, in theory at least, there are 2⁴³ possible labels! The descriptors are reviewed regularly by FOSI's international Advisory Council to ensure that they continue to reflect the issues that are important to parents. The 2008 vocabulary is already published in draft form² and will be introduced later this year. FOSI is confident that the ICRA system already does meet and will continue to meet the "more subtle concerns of parents and teachers."

But… FOSI fully appreciates that its ICRA system needs a significant overhaul and this is in progress. Later in 2008 a new system will be launched that directly answers the report's call "to involve end-users for more fine-grained classification." Any user will be able to create an ICRA label for any web content, not just the content that they create themselves.

This new system will embrace fully the Web 2.0 paradigm so that ICRA Data will not only describe the Web content that is of most interest to end users but those descriptions will carry a confidence rating based on the number of users who agreed with it and the reputation of those users. Extra weight will be given to content providers' own descriptions (i.e. those that do include a link to the label) and the ICRAchecked service³, in which the label is compared to the content it describes, will be expanded. FOSI is building the systems and the infrastructure to become a large scale repository of very fine-grained descriptions of a lot of content.

Incidentally, the new ICRA system will be adept at describing content on social network sites down to the level of an individual profile - it's going to be exciting!

Underlying this move is the development of a new technology designed to overcome the problems encountered with the PICS system⁴. FOSI chairs the W3C Working Group that is developing the Protocol for Web Description Resources (POWDER)⁵. This will use XML, RDF and OWL technologies to bring the benefits of the Semantic Web⁶ to every day situations in a very practical way.

Allied to that work is the QUATRO Plus project⁷, being carried out under the Safer Internet Programme, which uses the same technology to make trustmarks machine readable and interoperable. A big part of the project is the provision of tools and infrastructure to allow end users to rate labels and to highlight content that meets user-defined criteria such as quality, educational relevance, medical accuracy and so on.

All these projects: the new ICRA system. POWDER and QUATRO Plus are scheduled for release around the middle of 2008.

In short - FOSI, which incorporates ICRA, is taking very active steps to meet the demands identified in the benchmark report.

6 March 2008

FOSI Comment on the SIP-Bench Synthesis Report

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