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This introduces the Internet Content Rating Association and its technologies for preventing access to objectionable content.
About ICRA
Many are concerned with objectionable content on the Internet. ICRA, the Internet Content Rating Association, has long supported technologies to help people block content which they consider objectionable. With these technologies, websites can specify the kinds of content they contain, e.g. possibly objectionable language, nudity, sex, and violence; users can specify what kinds of content they want blocked when they surf the web; and browsers or other software then block such content.
ICRA has traditionally supported the W3C PICS standard, which was established to meet this concern. In mid-2005, however, ICRA switched to a new RDF-based technology which is more capable and more flexible than PICS.
Rating a Site
PICS Rating
ICRA supported a self-rating system: you filled out a form with questions about the content of your website; the form generated a meta tag which encoded the answers to these questions; you then inserted the PICS meta tag into the HTML files. For example, the xHTML meta tag for the Browser News is:
<meta http-equiv="PICS-Label" content='(PICS-1.1 "http://www.icra.org/ratingsv02.html" l gen true for "http://www.upsdell.com/" r (cz 1 lz 1 nz 1 oz 1 vz 1) "http://www.rsac.org/ratingsv01.html" l gen true for "http://www.upsdell.com/" r (n 0 s 0 v 0 l 0))' />
RDF Rating
ICRA supports a self-rating system: you fill out a form with questions about the content of your website; the form generates an RDF file which encodes the answers to these questions, and also generates a meta tag which points to the RDF file; you must copy the RDF file to the top of your site, and insert the RDF meta tag into your HTML files. For example, the xHTML meta tag for the Browser News is:
<link rel="meta" href="http://upsdell.com/labels.rdf" type="application/rdf+xml" title="ICRA labels" />
And the file, labels.rdf, is:
<?xml version="1.0"?>
<rdf:RDF
xmlns:rdf="http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#"
xmlns:rdfs="http://www.w3.org/2000/01/rdf-schema#"
xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/"
xmlns:dcterms="http://purl.org/dc/terms/"
xmlns:label="http://www.w3.org/2004/12/q/contentlabel#"
xmlns:icra="http://www.icra.org/rdfs/vocabularyv03#">
<rdf:Description rdf:about="">
<dc:creator rdf:resource="http://www.icra.org" />
<dcterms:issued>2005-7-12</dcterms:issued>
<label:authorityFor>http://www.icra.org/rdfs/vocabularyv03#</label:authorityFor>
</rdf:Description>
<label:Ruleset>
<label:hasHostRestrictions>
<label:Hosts>
<label:hostRestriction>upsdell.com</label:hostRestriction>
</label:Hosts>
</label:hasHostRestrictions>
<label:hasDefaultLabel rdf:resource="#label_1" />
<label:rules rdf:parseType="Collection">
<rdf:Description>
<label:hasURI>^http://www\.upsdell\.com/StEdwardTheConfessor/</label:hasURI>
<label:hasLabel rdf:resource="#label_2"/>
</rdf:Description>
</label:rules>
</label:Ruleset>
<label:ContentLabel rdf:ID="label_1">
<rdfs:comment>Label for most of website</rdfs:comment>
<icra:nz>1</icra:nz>
<icra:sz>1</icra:sz>
<icra:vz>1</icra:vz>
<icra:lz>1</icra:lz>
<icra:oz>1</icra:oz>
<icra:cz>1</icra:cz>
<rdfs:label>No nudity, No sexual material, No violence, No potentially offensive language, No potentially harmful activities, No user-generated content</rdfs:label>
</label:ContentLabel>
<label:ContentLabel rdf:ID="label_2">
<rdfs:comment>Label for St. Edward the Confessor</rdfs:comment>
<icra:nz>1</icra:nz>
<icra:sz>1</icra:sz>
<icra:vz>1</icra:vz>
<icra:lz>1</icra:lz>
<icra:oz>1</icra:oz>
<icra:cb>1</icra:cb>
<rdfs:label>No nudity, No sexual material, No violence, No potentially offensive language, No potentially harmful activities, User-generated content such as chat rooms and message boards (unmoderated)</rdfs:label>
</label:ContentLabel>
</rdf:RDF>
After rating your site you may add an ICRA logo or button, including this one, which I have optimized for minimum load time and improved appearance:
Validating a Site
ICRA offers a fee-based ICRAcheck service which will verifying the correctness of the rating of a site. A validated site is added to a database of validated sites, and entitles the site to display a special icon.
Recognizing a Site
The European QUATRO project released a browser extension and a search annotation tool that make it easy for users to recognise websites that have labels such as trustmarks, seals of approval, and content descriptions [more...] [more...] and determine when have been validated.