QuatroPlus News

• Youth Panels from three countries, Greece, the Netherlands and the Czech Republic are participating in pilots which uses the Quality Social Network (QSN) tool to label websites according to their suitability for children. The Youth Panels typically consist of around a dozen young people between the ages of 12 and 18 who advise organisations on how best to promote safe online practices to their peers. A special vocabulary was developed consisting of ten negative and four positive attributes for the Youth Groups to use for labelling a proposed set of URLs. The project will use feedback from these trials to improve the usability of the QSN.
• The Adolescent Health Unit in Greece specialises in the treatment of eating disorders for youth e.g. bulimia and anorexia. There are many websites which cover this subject – some provide helpful information for sufferers and parents whilst others may be considered harmful in that they promote conditions such as anorexia as a lifestyle choice and for example, provide advice on how to hide the condition (such sites are known as Pro Ana ). The AHU pilot aimed to create a white list of good sites with help from AHU experts and using content analysis technology. From an initial list of around 1,100 websites, 65 websites were eventually passed by the experts at AHU as sources of good information. Content analysis was used to screen out a large number of websites, reducing the final number down to 70 candidates from which the final 65 were used to create the white list.
• The Protocol for Web Description Resources (POWDER) finally became a W3C Proposed Recommendation on the 4th June 2009. The purpose of POWDER is to provide a standard but flexible method for describing web resources so that people can search for, display, filter and select the resources they choose based upon the descriptors which have to be understood by computers in order to provide this type of functionality. Quapro + handles both POWDER and POWDER-S labels which means all the applications will work with POWDER labels.
  For further information see: www.w3.org/2007/powder/
• The Quatro Plus project had a Mid-Term Review in November and has received very positive feedback from the reviewers. One of the main recommendations is to focus upon child safety in keeping with the objectives of the Safer Internet Programme even though quality labels can have a much wider remit. With this in mind, the project are taking on a new partner, i-Sieve, who provide a filtering application based on language engineering and image processing called Filter-X. This can detect pornographic content normally considered unsuitable for minors and will add an extra layer of protection to the existing labels accessed through Quatro by creating additional labels based on the W3C POWDER recommendation which accurately describe the content it filters.
• Software602 recently exhibited at the INVEX-DIGITEX show held annually in Brno and promoted the Quatro Plus project - please see their Press Release for further information.
• In an interview with the BBC, Sir Tim Berners-Lee (inventor of the World Wide Web), expressed his support for labels that indicate the trustworthiness of information on websites due to his concern at all the misinformation available on the Internet. An example of this was that a black hole would be created when the Hadron Collider was started up at CERN! Sir Tim did not advocate a particular approach - W3C had looked at a variety of methods - but acknowledged that a variety of approaches could be used. Quatro Plus follows this strategy by providing a flexible platform for making quality labels and trustmarks machine-readable and will conform to the W3C POWDER protocols when this becomes available shortly.
• UNIMI, with assistance from other Quatro+ partners, will shortly start the usabilty testing on the Label Management Environment (LME) tool. Initially, the LME will be aimed at Domain Experts for the creation and maintence of labels. The usability testing will ensure that the LME works in the way the end users expect it to and that it conforms to the design of the existing Viq and LADi tools. The results of the evaluation will be reported on this website when ready.