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

