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Browsing Companion

An informal name for the notion of a Web browser add-on or component which provides user interface elements that expose metadata such as ratings, reviews, critiques, etc. to users as they browse and which may solicit ratings or annotations from the users in the same interface.

DSig

The DSig 1.0 is a W3C recommendation describing a method of utilising PICS 1.1 labels for making digitally-signed, machine-readable assertions about a particular information resource. Future work will extend DSig to other metadata formats such as XML and/or RDF. The RDF model inclusions an explicit notion of "statements" (or assertions) in anticipation of mechanisms for digitally signing blocks of RDF statements.

DutchESS

Dutch Electronic Subject Service.

EELS

Harvester

An automated program for extracting and indexing the content of Web pages. The "Combine" Harvester developed under DESIRE phase one is currently being extended to support indexing of RDF metadata.

HTTP Proxy

An HTTP proxy acts as an interacting service between HTTP clients (Web browsers) and HTTP served Web sites. These proxies can cache pages for faster retrieval and may be well placed to provide additional metadata services, e.g. adding HTTP headers to reference related resources.

Java

An object oriented programming language and virtual machine developed by Sun Microsystems.

JavaScript

JavaScript is an interpreted programming or script language from Netscape that can be imbedded in HTML pages and interpreted by the Web browser.

Label Bureau

A server that distributes third party labels of Internet resources; as defined in the PICS 1.1 standard. Labels can refer to any characteristic of the content and can also be used to rate privacy policy, terms and conditions or intended audience, etc. It is likely that extensions to the Resource Description Framework will define a generalised successor to the PICS label bureau mechanism.

Metadata

Machine understandable information for the Web.

PICS

PICS is a W3C specification which enables labels (metadata) to be associated with Internet content.

Ratings Vocabulary

The term ‘vocabulary’ is broadly analogous to ‘lexicon’, ’dictionary’ or ‘language’. In the context of PICS and RDF, a vocabulary defines a set of categories, attributes (‘properties’) and legal values that can be used for making statements about Web resources. See also: Schema

Resource Description Framework (RDF)

Infrastructure that enables the encoding, exchange and reuse of structured metadata.

ROADS

Resource Organisation and Discovery in Subject Based Services - software and systems for setting up subject based information gateways.

RSAC

Recreational Software Advisory Council, a non-profit organisation that developed a content rating system designed to help parents supervise the content to which their children has access.

SafeSurf

SafeSurf is an independent organisation providing a voluntary Internet rating system for labelling Web pages.

Schema

In the context of PICS and RDF, a ‘schema’ provides a machine-readable definition for (one version of) a vocabulary or rating system.

SGML

Standard Generalized Mark-up Language is a generic mark-up language for representing documents.

SOSIG

Social Science Information Gateway. SOSIG is a subject gateway providing a selected catalogue to social science Internet resources.

Subject Gateway

W3C

International industry consortium, jointly hosted by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Laboratory for Computer Science [MIT/LCS] in the United States; the Institut National de Recherche en Informatique et en Automatique [INRIA] in Europe; and the Keio University Shonan Fujisawa Campus in Japan.

Warwick Framework

A container architecture for aggregating sets of metadata.

Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI)

XML

The Extensible Markup Language (XML) is a data format for structured document and data interchange on the Web.

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