On Thu, 8 Apr 1999, A.Dawson wrote:
> Re webtechs:
> I suspect we'll see more of this kind of thing.
> A few weeks ago we removed http://www.groveartmusic.com/
> from the BUBL LINK database as it is also now a porn site.
> Originally it was provided by MacMillan Publishing, giving details of
> Grove's Dictionaries of Music and Dictionary of Art, including sample articles.
>
> We picked up this change as a result of our manual link checking procedures.
> We use LINKBOT for automatic link checking, but as long as the URL
> is operational I don't think it will report any problem.
> Does anyone know how to pick up such changes via an automated
> link checking process?
In principle it should be possible to write a smarter link checker which
periodically consulted a PICS [1] metadata label bureau and asked it for
a description of each site, eg. using a pornography-filtering ratings
vocabulary like RSACi. Unfortunately I can't find any details of a
public ratings bureau that we might use (perhaps the market for such
services dried up?). The list of PICS Bureau Services at [2] seems a bit
stale. Both Microsoft and Netscape browser now support PICS so there
must be some servers out there somewhere...
Here's an offer: if someone can find me a public PICS bureau that
serves up porn/notporn classifications (eg. using RSACi), I'll write a
simple linkchecker that'll work with ROADS, BUBL or other catalogues and
make sure we're not accidentally pointing to anything we oughtn't. This
would be an interesting exercise in itself, ie. contrasting our internet
cataloguing efforts with those of the moral m**ority. A search on "sex"
at SOSIG [3] brings up 125 (respectable!) hits, for example. I'd love to
know how many of those are excluded by net-filtering software...
Dan
ps. for an ILRT/UKOLN authored DESIRE report on the application of
PICS/XML/RDF to information quality issues, see [4].
[1] http://www.w3.org/PICS/
[2] http://www.w3.org/PICS/bureaus.htm
[3] http://www.sosig.ac.uk/
[4] http://www.desire.org/html/research/deliverables/D3.1/
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