Introducing myself and my use case

Hi,

As we discussed on Tuesday, here's my introductory e-mail.

My day job (i.e. what pays my wages) is with the Family Online Safety 
Institute (FOSI). The name tells you that we're concerned with online 
safety of course. My particular interest is in using metadata in ways 
that help to promote safe environments and steer vulnerable people, 
especially children, away from the dangers.

My use case for MAWG is therefore:

Users, or their parents, should have greater control over the video they 
are offered. This does NOT mean using metadata on video simply as a 
trigger for a filter. It means describing (tagging, labelling - choose 
your word) video as being relevant to a particular subject, not 
containing flashing images that might trigger an epileptic fit or 
whatever -  and for that description to be open to verification. Who 
says this is good? When did they say it? and so on. Regular movie 
classification comes into that as well of course along with any number 
of other vocabularies (ours is at [1]).

Portals should be better able to personalise the video they offer their 
users - ideally it should make sound business sense all round. The 
cost/benefit of adding metadata to online assets should be tipped much 
more in favour of adding it. Video is of particular interest as, of 
course, it's a magnet for children.

This general use case is similar to those that motivated the development 
POWDER.

As some of you know, I'm chair of that WG [2]. We're just ending our 
Last Call period and hope to enter and exit CR next month with a view to 
reaching Rec at the end of the year (our charter expires 31/12). The aim 
there is to make trusted metadata a ubiquitous part of the Web - 
something that's easy to do and easy to decide whether you're going to 
trust a particular bit of metadata. It's designed to describe lots of 
things at once, so "anything on example.com where the path ends with 
.mpg" is a POWDER-like group, for example. Typical use cases are 
machine-readable trustmarks (like mobileOK), expert recommendations etc.

The promotion/wide use of POWDER is of benefit to FOSI as it means more 
tools creating and using the data format, thus making it easier to use 
the ICRA vocabulary.

As for a commitment to the group - I've not yet formally signed up. This 
is because POWDER is not yet finished and that, as you'll understand, 
must be my priority within W3C. Furthermore, the W3C price hike is 
putting FOSI's continued membership of the organisation very much under 
question so I don't know whether I am going to be eligible to contribute 
in future.

In summary therefore - I'd like to participate and hope to do so, but I 
am not in a position to make a proper commitment just yet.

Meanwhile... I must send my regrets as I will be unable to join the 
calls for the next 2 Tuesdays.

Phil.

[1] http://www.icra.org/vocabulary/
[2] http://www.w3.org/2007/powder/

-- 
Phil Archer
Chief Technical Officer,
Family Online Safety Institute
w. http://www.fosi.org/people/philarcher/

Register now for the annual Family Online Safety Institute Conference 
and Exhibition, December 11th, 2008, Washington, DC.
See http://www.fosi.org/conference2008/

Received on Thursday, 11 September 2008 15:09:40 UTC