PICS and RDF

PICS is a mechanism for communicating ratings of web pages from a server to clients; these ratings, or rating labels, contain information about the content of web pages: for example, whether a particular page contains a peer-reviewed research article, or was authored by an accredited researcher, or contains sex, nudity, violence, foul language etc. Instead of being a fixed set of criteria, PICS introduced a general mechanism for creating rating systems. Different organizations could rate content based on their own objectives and values, and users - for example, parents worried about their children's web usage - could set their browser to filter out any web pages not matching their own criteria.

One of the requirements for the RDF design is that it be able to express everything that a PICS-1.1 (Platform for Internet Content Selection) label can express, and that it be possible to automatically translate PICS-1.1 labels into RDF format without loss of information. Any future technical work on PICS will evolve it to using RDF. The W3C PICS Interest Group is chartered to decide when this transition is appropriate. Software and Web content using PICS-1.1 will remain a supported W3C Recommendation for as long as the market demands.

It is expected, that PICS-1.1 and an equivalent expression of PICS ratings in RDF will both be useful for quite some time.