It is an infrastructure for associating labels (metadata) with web pages
PICS is designed to help parents and teachers control what children access on the Internet
It also facilitates other uses for labels, including code signing, privacy, and intellectual property rights management
It places the responsibility for labeling in the hands of the creator of the site and the responsibility for filtering in the hands of the user of the browser
PICS includes a set of standards allowing
Self-rating: content providers can voluntarily label the content they create and distributePICS compliant software contains a filter and a set of rules that are based on labelsThird-party rating: multiple, independent labeling services can apply additional labels to content created by others
They can devise their own labeling systems, so the same content may receive different labels from different services
Ease-of-use: parents and teachers can use ratings and labels from many of sources to control the information that children under their supervision receive
It works like this:
Taken from http://www.w3.org/PICS/iacwcv2.htm
PICS uses:
A syntax for describing a rating service, so that computer programs can present the service and its labels to usersA syntax for labels, so that computer programs can process them
A label describes either a single document or a group of documents (e.g., a site.)A label may be digitally signed and may include a cryptographic hash of the associated document
An embedding of labels (actually, lists of labels) into the RFC-822 transmission format and the HTML document format
An extension of the HTTP protocol, so clients can request that labels be transmitted with a document
A query-syntax for an on-line database of labels (a label bureau)
| This page prepared by Howard Rosenbaum | Last update: 11.12.98 |
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