Parsing HTML: Adult Classification Systems

Question

I'm research the different and (sometimes obsolete) Ratings/Classification standards used on the web. i.e. PICS, POWDER, ICRA

Which standard is the most popular (number of sites using it)?

Is there a C# library which will handle any (or all) of these?

Answer 1

You shouldn’t use PICS anymore. From http://www.w3.org/2007/powder/:

POWDER has superseded PICS as the recommended method for describing Web sites and building applications that act on such descriptions. A comparison of PICS and POWDER is available separately.

In the linked document you can read:

This means that W3C does not recommend any further development of software that uses PICS, the use cases for which are covered by POWDER which offers significant advantages as detailed below.

ICRA has been discontinued:

As of October 2010, the ICRA labeling engine has been discontinued by FOSI. Additionally, FOSI has withdrawn all support for the ICRA rating system and taken down all documentation for labeling websites with ICRA ratings. The reason is the ICRA label failed to gain widespread acceptance.

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So, we should use POWDER.

However, POWDER is only framework, so you’d still need a classification (resp. a RDF vocabulary) for content rating which you could use with POWDER. The POWDER Primer includes an example using the ICRA vocabulary, FWIW.

See the related question: Are there any alternatives to ICRA for self-regulated content labeling of websites?