PICS is a pair of Protocols, allowing labels to be applied to WWW content. These Protocols empower any individual or organization to design and distribute labels reflecting their views about the content. PICS was pioneered by W3C as a practical alternative to global governmental censorship of the Internet. In addition, the same technology facilitates searching the WWW and provides a foundation for establishing trust in information on the WWW. PICS labels are rather limited in their expressiveness. A new version of PICS will be based on RDF, facilitating
Technology Inventory [broken link as of July 2005]. Lorrie Cranor and Paul Resnick. This inventory was first distributed at the December 1997 Internet On-line summit: Focus on Children. The on-line version was updated until the summer of 1999. It also lists some products and services that are not PICS-compatible.
The following resource lists are being maintained by members of the PICS developers' community. Contact the maintainer of each individual list with additional links. The maintainers have all agreed to be fast and fair in maintaining these
The rules interpreting PICS labels are entirely local to clients. A client receives a PICS label and decides the effect that this particular label should have, based on local rules. Although these rules can be specified in a product-specific way, W3C has defined a language for them. This language is PICSRules []. PICSRules has the following advantages over proprietary approaches:
* Sharing and installation of profiles
The creation of profiles (a certain set of rules) can be complicated, and by using a common language, a profile can be created and
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