Rating and filtering using RDF

Dear all,

As you know, RDF supersedes PICS.  The dominant PICS rating service on the
web today is that offered by the Internet Content Rating Association (ICRA)
which itself superseded RSACi in 1999.  Backed by the likes of AOL Europe,
Microsoft, Cable & Wireless, IA Japan, Verizon etc., ICRA is not about to
abandon PICS altogether but we do want to make the rating vocabulary
available in RDF imminently.



There are however some problems, notably, the apparent inability of RDF as
currently defined to allow a single description to be applied to multiple
URIs.  The now removed aboutEachPrefix was designed to address this but had
problems.  We need to revisit this as it is essential that some sort of
mechanism be available to allow content providers to write one description
to cover the whole of their site/areas of their site etc. There are other
issues too, born of ICRA's experience of working with webmasters of all
kinds to "label their sites."



To this end, I have established a small interest group to look at RDF in
relation to rating and filtering, as well as encouraging large-scale take up
of RDF metadata for other purposes, notably sophisticated descriptive
ontologies (so the OWL work is very relevant). Development of demonstration
tools to apply labels and to filter accordingly is part of the group's
planned work.  A preliminary discussion via e-mail is beginning now, leading
to a face to face meeting in Luxembourg on Tuesday 4th February.



If you are interested in participating in this activity, please let me know
directly and I can point you to further information.



Phil Archer
Chief Technical Officer
Internet Content Rating Association

www.icra.org

Received on Monday, 6 January 2003 09:23:20 UTC