AS .XXX adult domains went on sale earlier this week, Irish entrepreneur Paul Walsh’s MetaCert released filtering software that makes use of the labelling of sexually explicit content to provide safe surfing for parents and schools.
MetaSurf is a free browser plug-in using Semantic Web technology to dynamically label and filter both .XXX domains and other web pages containing adult content.
The system is context-aware: it flags up sexually explicit content without broadly filtering for keywords that could blacklist sites on subjects such as breast cancer awareness.
“Some providers have an ‘all-or-nothing’ approach to filtering content,” Walsh says. “MetaSurf, where appropriate, will label individual pages and sub-domains that contain sexually explicit content.”
He adds that it can target adult pages within Facebook without blocking the entire site.
To date, more than 250 million web pages containing adult content have been labelled. Browsers using the MetaSurf plug-in will not be able to view these sites.
MetaSurf uses technology that meets the Worldwide Web Consortium’s web content labelling standard called Powder (Protocol for Web Resource Description), to which Walsh’s company contributed.
“Powder is now possibly one of the biggest implementations of the Semantic Web and one that will truly benefit ordinary people who have never even heard of the Consortium, or indeed the Semantic Web,” he says.
It took almost six years for this to become a standard and when it finally did in December 2009, it also formally replaced the old PICS standard.
PICS allows developers to tag their content in a self-regulatory manner and is no longer supported as a W3C standard, Walsh adds, but it “is still in use by Microsoft Internet Explorer today and is used by some major corporations as part of their family safety solutions”.
MetaCert has built a platform that constantly searches, labels and classifies content, with the ability to immediately reclassify and relabel should the necessity arise.
“We only label sites for our ‘white list’ that we know not to be adult content to ensure they are not picked up by our spiders, to help optimise our platform.
“The massive data set of adult content is the value-add: parents can decide to block it without blocking other age-appropriate content they might deem appropriate. Sexually explicit content is the one type that every parent would like to block for their families.”
The MetaSurf plug-in is already available for Firefox with releases for Chrome, Internet Explorer and Safari to follow.
