Yes. While the motivation for PICS was concern over children accessing inappropriate materials, it is a general "meta-data" system, meaning that labels can provide any kind of descriptive information about Internet materials. For example, a labeling vocabulary could indicate the literary quality of an item rather than its appropriateness for children. Most immediately, PICS labels could help in finding particularly desirable materials (see, for example, NetShepherd's label-informed Alta Vista search), and this is the main motivation for the ongoing work
PICS is a pair of Protocols, allowing labels to be applied to WWW content. These Protocols empower any individual or organization to design and distribute labels reflecting their views about the content. PICS was pioneered by W3C as a practical alternative to global governmental censorship of the Internet. In addition, the same technology facilitates searching the WWW and provides a foundation for establishing trust in information on the WWW. PICS labels are rather limited in their expressiveness. A new version of PICS will be based on RDF, facilitating
With the growth of the web, the amount and the nature of information available on the web encompasses many different cultures and lifestyles. One frequent requirement from web users has been to be able to select resources based on content. One approach to this problem is the Platform for Internet Content Selection (PICS) as described by Resnick and Miller []. The basic idea is to create a platform for the definition of labels attached to resources.
Each label describes a rating of a resource based on a particular rating service. It is important to
PICS is a W3C specification for describing the content of resources with a metadata label. PICS was originally designed as a way for parents and teachers to gain control over the Web sites and pages that children could access on the Internet. The PICS standards facilitate the following:
* Self-rating Content providers voluntarily label the content they create and distribute.
* Third-party rating Independent labeling services associate labels with content created by others. These services may devise their own labeling, and multiple services