Can PICS be used for more than just content filtering?

Yes. While the motivation for PICS was concern over children accessing inappropriate materials, it is a general “meta-data” system, meaning that labels can provide any kind of descriptive information about Internet materials. For example, a labeling vocabulary could indicate the literary quality of an item rather than its appropriateness for children. Most immediately, PICS labels could help in finding particularly desirable materials (see, for example, NetShepherd’s label-informed Alta Vista search), and this is the main motivation for the ongoing work on a next generation label format that can include arbitrary text strings. More generally, the W3C is working to extend Web meta-data capabilities generally and is applying them specifically in the following projects:

Digital Signature Project

coupling the ability to make assertions with a cryptographic signature block that ensures integrity and authenticity.
Intellectual Property Rights Management
using a meta-data system to label Web resources with respect to their authors, owners, and rights management information.

Privacy (P3)

Using a meta-data system to allow sites to make assertions about their privacy practices, and for users to express their preferences for the type of interaction they want to have with those sites.

Regardless of content control, meta-data systems such as PICS are going to be an important part of the Web, because they enable more sophisticated commerce (build and manage trust relationships), communication, indexing, and searching services.

“The promise of digital commerce is that it will allow you to use the Internet to purchase the services of the best organic gardening advisors or mad cow disease specialists, whether they live in Santa Clara or Timbuktu. To do this, you need to do more than verify that the person at the other end of the wire is who he says he is. You need to assess competence, reliability, judgment. In other words, you need a system of branding, but applied much more widely for highly specialized and hard-to-evaluate services and products. You need value-added services that will not only lead you to the right product or service but also rate its quality or otherwise vouch for it.”