Rating Information Collecting and Distributing in PICS Protocol

Abstract

Content selection is used to solve the problem of inappropriate information, and PICS protocol, which developed by W3C, is widely used in many content selection and rating services. In order to solve several issues in a PICS-based rating service, a new mechanism for rating information collecting and distributing is proposed in this paper. A collaborative environment is proposed to solve the problem in rating information collecting. Users’ opinions about web content will be collected and analyzed to conclude objective rating information for rating service. In addition to rating information collecting, rating information distribution is another important issue as designing a rating system. In order to solve the issues in storage, performance, and integrity of rating information for a label bureau in PICS protocol, an LDAP-based Distributed Rating Service, named LDRS, is also proposed. We also design a questionnaire to understand the opinions concerning the Internet content selection of users, and some results will be shown in the experiment. Besides, LDAP-based Distributed Rating Service is implemented and some performance evaluations are also shown in the experiment.