PICS Platform for Internet Content Selection is an infrastructure for associating labels (metadata) with internet resources. The initial goal of this infrastructure, content filtering, is now evolving to address the broader issues of content selection including richer resource descriptive schemes, organizational management, discovery and retrieval, intellectual property rights and privacy protection tasks. This W3C working group will define a new format for labels in order to better address these issues. This label format is based on the original specification as defined in PICS-1.1. The new format will permit non-numeric values (e.g., strings), structured values (e.g., an author and corresponding affiliation) and element repeatability.

This working group will also incorporate label format modifications and/or standard extensions required for the reference info (including a more general form of document hashing than the rsa-md5 specified for PICS-1.1). These modifications will be coordinated with the W3C Digital Signature and Digital Collections Working Group.

PLEASE NOTE: The W3C Metadata activities have been restructured. The PICS-NG working group and the DSIG Collections working group have merged and are now under the auspics of the RDF Resource Description Framework working group(s). The following page is no longer being kept up to date.

Anticipated Deliverables of the Working Group

• PICS-NG Metadata Model
• PICS-NG Metadata Model and Label Syntax, Draft Version 3.5, May 14, 1997 (working group members only)
• PICS-NG application/service specifications
• Labeling Services and Labeling Systems/Schemas, Draft Version 0.1, June 20, 1997 (working group members only)
• Various examples of the PICS-NG application/service specification which can express resource description schemes (i.e. Dublin Core)

Desired Additional Deliverables

• Tools to facilitate the creation of resource description labels for Internet content.
• Update to Profiles Language which expresses a filter based on a string category.

Working Group Resources

• XML-Data, Andrew Layman, Jean Paoli, Steve De Rose, Henry S. Thompson (June 20, 1997)
• Options for Implementing Namespaces in XML, Tim Bray and Andrew Layman (May 30, 1997)
• Meta Content Framework Using XML, R.V. Guha and Tim Bray, (June 6, 1997)
• Completed Specifications for PICS-1.1 Service Descriptions
• Completed Specifications for PICS-1.1 Label format and distribution
• Extension of PICS-NG to support text-based metadata based on the Dublin Core.
  • <URL: http://www.dstc.edu.au/RDU/PICS/proposal03.html> (March 24, 1997)
• PICS-SE: A Proposed for the Annotation of Internet Documents using a String Extension to PICS
• "The Warwick Framework:", A Container Architecture for Aggregating Sets of Metadata, C. Lagoze, C. A. Lynch, R. Daniel Jr. (1996)
• On Information Factoring in Dublin Metadata Records, C. M. Sperberg-McQueen, (April 17, 1996)

Additional Information

• Working Group Listserv Archive (Working group members only)

Relevant Readings

• Not Censorship but Selection, Lester E. Asheim, Wilson Library Bulletin, 1953.
• Filtering on the Internet by Paul Resnick in Scientific American, March 1997.
• PICS: Internet Access Controls Without Censorship, Paul Resnick and Jim Miller, Communications of the ACM, 1996, vol. 39(10), pp. 87-93.
• The Electronic Frontier Foundation's Rating, Filtering and Labeling of Online Content Archive.
• The Ratings Game, IBM Discussion and Information about PICS .