Semantic labelling scheme for Web pages
Published: 12 Jul 2005 16:20 BST
The Internet Content Rating Association released a new content labelling system on Tuesday, using RDF as the base for the new standard.
The move is being billed as a fundamental shift in content labelling towards a more widely applicable system. The UK-based charity body is a member of the W3C and has been working on standards for content labelling since its inception in 1999.
ICRA's previous labelling standard, PICS, was created that year with the aim of preventing children seeing inappropriate Web content. However, it was only adopted by a minority of Web content providers, and ICRA hopes that the move to RDF will lead to more Web sites being labelled.
Phil Archer, CTO of ICRA, told Builder UK that the organisation was disappointed by the lack of PICS labelling on Web sites. "That's why we wanted to change it. We recognised that the take-up [of PICS] was well below what we would like, so we thought about what we could do to make it more attractive. We thought 'let's see if we can move to a platform where there's other reasons for doing it'. If you have five reasons for doing something rather than one, you're more likely to do it" said Archer.
RDF is a W3C standard for metadata, first published in 1999, and forms an important part of the strategy to create a Semantic Web. While RDF hasn't been widely adopted for Web site description, it has found a niche as part of the architecture of the Mozilla family of browsers, which use RDF for internal data sources.
ICRA believes that despite a lack of popularity so far, RDF is the best tool for the job. "PICS was designed ten years ago, and it was designed to do a very specific job. The problem with that is that because it's single use, it doesn't have a wider application, people didn't find it particularly attractive" said Archer. "RDF has a far wider application, not just child protection, which is why we felt we should be a part of that bigger thing. There are a number of reasons why professional Web developers would want to add RDF descriptions of their content, one of which would be child protection. That doesn't dilute our basic message of wanting to look after kids."
The new ICRA scheme can be mixed with other metadata standards, such as Dublin Core. The ICRA Web site has tools to generate and test RDF content labels. Archer said that ICRA hopes this will spur on content providers to use the system. "ICRA has produced its own schema, and said if you're making content labels, you should include these. We're also working with other organisations such as trust mark operators, with the plan that their trust labels will also use the same scheme," he said.
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