Thanks David, Shahsi and Stefano for your replies,
I'll follow up on all your suggestions. I'm taking part in the rules
workshop at the end of the month so I'm aware that there's a lot of
interesting activity in this area. Thanks for the extra pointer Shahsi.
Meanwhile if I can find someone with the skills and time to write a patch,
I'll be sure to be in touch.
Thanks again
Phil.
----- Original Message -----
From: "David Huynh" <dfhuynh_at_csail.mit.edu>
To: <general_at_simile.mit.edu>
Sent: Saturday, April 09, 2005 4:33 AM
Subject: Re: Piggy Bank and rules
> Hi Phil,
>
> I'm personally very excited at the prospect that Piggy Bank's usefulness
> extends beyond what it was designed for. Though I don't personally have
> the wisdom to contribute to this topic of censorship, nor the time to help
> you out with the programming, I'd be happy to answer questions on how our
> software works so that you or your colleagues can make the necessary
> adaptation.
>
> With regards to whether there is wider value for rules in PB, I'd say,
> just implement it, and if other people want it, they'll tell you to
> generalize it. :-)
>
> David
>
>
> Phil Archer wrote:
>
>> Hi all,
>>
>> I sent Ryan an e-mail the other day and he suggested I shared this with
>> the full list so, after a bit of a delay, here goes.
>>
>> I wanted to let you know first of all how incredibly useful Piggy Bank is
>> being for me in talking to about the virtues of the Semantic Web. My
>> organisation, ICRA [1], currently uses the old PICS standard to add
>> labels to content that describe whether it contains sex, nudity, violence
>> etc. Filters, ideally ones built onto browsers, can then allow or block
>> access to content based on those labels. The best known example of this
>> is Content Advisor in Internet Explorer that comes with an old rating
>> system called RSACi. That organisation/rating system lead to ICRA. We're
>> now working to move labelling from PICS to RDF.
>>
>> OK, introductory history lesson over.
>>
>> Our use case involves content providers linking a small number of
>> descriptions, what we call content labels, to any number of resources.
>> For example, "there is no sex or nudity on icra.org". That's more than
>> one URI we're trying to describe and to make RDF work, we need a way to
>> encode that. Further, we need to be able to say "everything at
>> www.example.org/artistic_nudes has description A while everything else on
>> the example.org domain has description B."
>>
>> This has lead to the development of a simple rule set that is predicated
>> on matching the URL of a resource for which we want a description against
>> a sequence of one or more Perl5 regular expressions. The first match then
>> leads to a description - what we call a content label.
>>
>> Use cases and test data at [2], schema description at [3].
>>
>> And so to my question - do you see any wider value in Piggy Bank (or
>> other SW helper applications) working with the kind of rule set ideas
>> we're now using in our own use case? Let me expand a little further.
>>
>> The content label testing tool I've hacked together on our site [4]
>> visits a target URL and looks for RDF data, then narrows in to look
>> specifically for ICRA labels (my plan is to expand this in the near
>> future but I'm in concept-proving mode still). There's a small chunk of
>> rdf on my personal site at www.archersenglish.co.uk/labels.rdf. There are
>> links to this same file in both the homepage and a dummy page set up at
>> www.archersenglish.co.uk/589/. Links [5] and [6] below take the label
>> tester off to those 2 pages respectively, it grabs the RDF instance and
>> then works out which ICRA label applies to the URL in question - needless
>> to say you get a different result for each URL.
>>
>> This is due to the simple rules encoded in the RDF instance - any URL on
>> a given list of hosts gets "label 1", but if the URL contains "589" it
>> gets label 2. Piggy Bank knows nothing about these rules of course so it
>> shows all the RDF classes (in my terms, both possible labels) and the
>> rule set itself.
>>
>> If Piggy Bank were to gain a deep an meaningful understanding of the rule
>> set [3] (i.e. had some code added to support the functionality!) it would
>> demonstrate the enormous potential of all this to the internet safety
>> community. Yes, the labels might be used for filtering but they can
>> equally be used to show through the kind of visualisation exemplified by
>> Piggy Bank that a site is a good resource for homework, contains medical
>> information that can be trusted and so on.
>>
>> Enough for one e-mail. I'm naturally keen to know what you think.
>>
>> Regards
>>
>> Phil
>>
>> [1] http://www.icra.org
>> [2] http://www.w3.org/2004/12/q/doc/rdf-contentlabels.html
>> [3] http://www.w3.org/2004/12/q/doc/content-labels-schema.htm
>> [4] http://www.icra.org/RDF/label/tester/
>> [5]
>> http://www.icra.org/cgi-bin/rdf/labelTester.cgi?lang=en&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.archersenglish.co.uk%2F&ignorePICS=on
>> [6]
>> http://www.icra.org/cgi-bin/rdf/labelTester.cgi?lang=en&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.archersenglish.co.uk%2F589%2F&ignorePICS=on
>>
>>
>> Phil Archer
>> Chief Technical Officer
>> Internet Content Rating Association
>> Label your site today at http://www.icra.org
>>
>
>
Received on Mon Apr 11 2005 - 09:47:16 EDT