Many quality labels appear on the accredited website simply as a logo. Commercial trustmarks almost all follow the ‘click to verify’ model where, if a user clicks on the logo, a certificate is shown originating from the trustmark operator showing when it was issued.

Some trustmarks may go further still. For example, the WMA logo displays the current date as an indication of its validity. However, there are a number of issues associated with this basic model:

• a logo can be easily copied;
• the user often has to visit a specific page on a website to see the quality label;
• there is no easy means of verifying that a passive label is valid;
• even those logos which do link to the trustmark operator can be vulnerable to spoofing since the certificate itself can be spoofed.

There are further problems too. Trustmarks are of particular benefit to small online traders who don’t have an established brand name. Among these smaller traders it is often the case that adding a logo to their website and linking it back to a URL provided by the trustmark operator is not something they have the technical skill to do.

One solution to these problems is to think of quality labels not as logos on pages to be seen by humans but as data on the web to be read by machines.

If made available through a suitable protocol, computers are able both to read and authenticate the labelling data and to perform actions based upon that information. For example, results returned by search engines such as Yahoo! and Google can be checked and label information associated with each URL accessed and displayed. This enables users to check the status of a website without actually having to click through to the actual website. This is what the Q+ LADI tool does – small label icons are shown next to the URLs displayed in the returned search results. Other similar systems are MacAfee SiteAdvisor and MyWot (My Web of Trust) where small icons are shown after the URL. If the mouse is moved onto an icon, then a short summary box is displayed about the web site’s safety (MacAfee) or to show the four MyWot ratings as shown in the picture above left.

All these tools effectively perform the ‘click to verify’ action and guide the user towards safer, more trusted, higher quality content. Matched against user-profiles this has the potential to create powerful customisation tools.

Finally, the problem of a trader not having the ability to add a logo to their website and link it to a given URL is solved. Whilst it remains true that including the logo on their page is a good visual guide for users, if the trustmark operator publishes the list of sites they accredit as data (as well as a simple list that they almost all do) then it is this data that the machines can use as a navigation aid, irrespective of the presence any logo on the page a user is looking at.

Quatro Plus

The original Quatro project developed machine-readable quality labels and some demonstrator tools to show how these could be used. The follow-on project, Quatro Plus, extended this work to make quality labels more universally accessible and to improve the underlying technical infrastructure by making it more efficient and robust.

In Quatro Plus, the label criteria are coded as a vocabulary. This is a set of terms which describes what the label assesses. Usually, these are ‘Yes’ or ‘No’ answers but sometimes the criteria may indicate whether something applies or not – e.g. country codes to show where the labelled site meets legal requirements. Each labelling authority will want to use their own vocabulary to describe the criteria they feel most important, however, the great majority of labels and trustmarks share some common terms such as the date the quality label was awarded, the organisation that awarded it, whether the site has contact information on it, etc. Consequently, the original quality label format, RDF-CL, was structured to contain information about the technical providence of the label, the common criteria and the criteria specific to an individual label. RDF-CL was used as the basis for further development and made a major contribution to the W3C POWDER Recommendation.

See the separate page on POWDER for more details.