Lately I have been tracking lots of article regarding Content Label. Lots of fun and also serious foolish discussion I came across. Apart from very few handful of people most people are just flying their finger on keyboard driving by ego, stupidity, blind supports or some other hidden agenda.

So let’s make it simple, first what is Content Label?

Content Label, which is also referred as cLabel is “a resource that contains a description, a definition of the scope of the description and declaration about both the circumstances of its own creation and the entity that created it.” In easy words, Content Label is marking digital contents with a label which identify it’s source, author, type, age rating etc. The coolest part is this Label is readable by both human and machine, thus easily definable by API or automated browser function(s)/application(s).

W3C Content Label Incubator Group (WCL XG), is on its way through a full recommendation track within the W3C. They will be proposed as a replacement for PICS. A lot of outstanding company like Opera, AT&T, Vodafone, Yahoo, Segala etc. and organizations like Internet Association of Japan, Internet Content Rating Association (ICRA),ILRT, University of Bristol etc. support this Content Label as a replacement of PICS. You can see the full list of participants here. So if some nonsense naive think cLabel is just a blog politics to limit freedom, they have no idea what is this all about.

What’s the use of content Label?

In general until now how we identify a content safe, or adult or classify into some other categories? For safety we put trustmarks like SSL Certificates, Hacker-Safe, Age-Ratings (ICRA) etc. So when a user landed on a site he/she can identify the content and its type and choose to access or not to access rest of the content. In practical that make no sense, since when a 13 year old boy landed on a adult site with a 18 year old visible rating one side and a blonde showing off her assets other side give him very much less room for making right decision.

But in today’s semantic web, we have the opportunity to label/mark a site’s content with metadata, where user will learn the type, author and rest of the content info before landing on the site. So naturally user choose what to get.

There are lots of other real life operation implementation of Content Labeling we already using like-FOAF, Present ICRA Rating, vCard, QUATRO, RDF etc. Everywhere in the net metadata is just coming up. There is no way of denying it, difference is just choosing among them.

Why Content Label is feasible?

Last few days I came across lots of moron saying, Content Label is just dumb since marking danger site/adult site barely block a children for visiting them, since they will find a way through it. I have to ask who says Content Label is just for marking Adult contents? that is just one of thousands possible implementation of cLabel. cLabel can be used to identify a friend I graduated, the hospital record of my 12 year old knee injury when i fell off the bike, a set of records linked to a known criminal, a Japanese story written in same subject you are researching…..it is just simply limitless.

If someone choose to ignore a sign like “Danger! High Voltage!” and wish to hold and make himself fried barbeque, no way someone can stop that, that necessarily mean city administration will stop posting those warning sign. Same way we didn’t yet gain Star Trek fantasy technology, which will determine who is bellow 18 year old and shut off the site automatically So that necessarily does not means we stop innovating new technology.

The purpose of cLabel is not stopping someone, but to identify clearly and effectively to both human and machine (Application and software) that what is about to be accessed. Now a Network administrator or the parents may have access to future software’s which will give them power to restrict access to certain website, since those website are digital labeled and easily detectable by software.

Content Label can reduce the time and resources cost for identifying and marking contents 80-90%. How? If you are familiar with ID3 tag, which is a metadata container most often used in conjunction with the MP3 audio file format. It allows information such as the title, artist, album, track number, or other information about the file to be stored in the file itself. So now for ID3 tag any music player can extract all necessary information regarding the song you are listening automatically, previously what you have to do by yourself. Same way Content Label/cLabel can mark billions of Digital content and sort it, link it and do many more things. Even Content Label can be used for trace certification, copyright, digital rights, ownership, mandate, codes of conduct etc.

Final words

Every technology/automated process rely on human intervention, judgement, input, honesty to perform better. cLabel is no different, it will require trustmarks provider’s credibility and honesty to mark everything as it is. This is utter stupidity to expect a application or technology to do the judgement for human. Its a tool to extend possibility not to eliminate duty/responsibility.