I've been chatting with Paul Walsh of Segala a lot recently - he's my new partner in crime at BIMA but also runs a company called Segala. I had to sit down with Paul last week to get the full deal on Segala and Content Labels. Paul has done a great job of explaining this in lay terms and when he demo'ed it to me I thought "shit, this is hot"...and the noticed he was doing it with a plugin to Firefox and wondered how we could get the same done for Internet Explorer.

Paul then explained to me that their work is being lauded as one of the best examples out there at the moment of the semantic web. Now, you could say that's Paul blowing his own trumpet but when I thought it through, I agreed. I mean, most of us waffle on about the semantic web but don't really know what it means. I tend to think of it as a "self explaining web" which is precisely what Content Labels do. They explain what the content is with a consistent set of labelling so you can easily validate if the content meets a set of guidelines to be non pornographic or viewable by the visually impaired. The crucial part is that you may think stuff like TrustE provide similar labelling - they do, but those logos are not readable by a browser - they're just a JPEG.

Paul goes in to this is much more detail but also with simplicity in his posting so it's well worth a read. What is interesting is how much steam this is gathering with the W3C where Segala has been working hard. So much so that as part of the W3C Charter, Content Labels will be proposed as a replacement for PICS. Significant as PICS is an old W3C Recommendation still in use by Internet Explorer for filtering content for example. Ivan Herman's of W3C includes Segala as a reference in his Semantic Web Applications presentation.

I need to go chat with the IE folks about this as to my basic view, there is much to be gained here.

Nice work Walshy. You're making the web safer and more intelligent!

Technorati tags: , , ,