PICS, SOIF, MCF

This page looks at the Platform for Internet Content Selection (PICS), a metadata-based standard for internet content, and at SOIF and MCF

It covers -

• introduction
• discontents
• SOIF
• MCF

     introduction

Many of the filters, blocking mechanisms and other content management regimes highlighted in Censorship & Free Speech guide elsewhere on this site are based on the Platform for Internet Content Selection (PICS), a metadata-based standard for internet content.  

PICS was developed in association with the World Wide Web Consortium as part of that body's interest in the 'architecture' of the Internet. Despite W3C endorsement it's never really got off the ground. 

It provides for tagging of web pages, eg allows them to be labelled as containing violent or sexually-explicit material and thereby excludes access from particular browsers. It does not specify the nature of the labels or their derivation.

     discontents

PICS is a building block for the Recreational Software Advisory Council (RSAC) rating scheme administered by the Internet Content Rating Association (ICRA), an industry body concerned with the invidious task of developing a viable content 'advisory' scheme, alerting surfers that there may be something unpleasant in the waters ahead.

ICRA has received some degree of endorsement from the EU, along with the inevitable denunciations from zealots who regard any content identification tool as tantamount to book burning. As we noted in our censorship guide, the 2000 report of the ICRA Advisory Board, drawing on the 'Best Practices' model (RTF) developed by the Information Society Project (ISP) at Yale's Law School, was construed by some as 'back to the drawing board'.

In December 2000 ICRA released a more sophisticated rating framework with endorsement by the CDT, arguably a major step forward. In February 2001 that framework was extended to several languages other than English.

Lawrence Lessig's Tyranny In The Infrastructure article in WIRED is an assessment of PICS by one of the more influential US legal polemicists, author of Code & Other Laws Of Cyberspace (New York: Basic Books 1999).

     SOIF

SOIF, the Summary Object Interchange Format, is an interoperability standard used in Harvest schemes.

     MCF

MCF, the Meta Content Framework, is an XML-based is a structure description language that can be used to associate data objects with properties (eg file sizes, authorship information, even an object's URL).

Its proponents suggest that MCF can encompass

a wide range of information about content. The content targeted includes web pages, gopher and ftp files, desktop files, email and structured (i.e., relational and object oriented) databases, etc. MCF is not intended to be an extension of markup languages such as HTML which can be used to hold embedded metadata. Instead it provides a format for holding the metadata externally to the content described. It is possible that metadata embedded in content will be extracted automatically by robots that use the MCF to represent the results of their activities. MCF should be able to represent the metadata that proposals such as the Dublin Core aim to cover.

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