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The Internet Content Rating Association (ICRA) is an international nonprofit organization with offices in the United States and the United Kingdom. Its mission is to help users find the content they want and can trust, and to filter out what they do not want for themselves or for their children. ICRA also acts as a forum through which both policy and technical infrastructure are defined to help shape the way that the Web and content distribution channels work.

ICRA has created a unique content description vocabulary that allows Web masters and digital content creators to self-label their content in categories such as nudity, sex, language, violence, other potentially harmful material, and chat. There are context variables such as art, medicine, and news. Thus, a piece of content or a site can be described as having depictions of nudes but in an artistic context. As content creators check the elements in the questionnaire that are present or absent from their websites, a small file is automatically generated using the RDF format, which is then linked to the content on one or more domains.

Users, especially parents of young children, can then use filtering software such as ICRAplus to allow or disallow various types of content. A key point is that ICRA does not rate Internet content; the content providers self-label, and then parents and other concerned adults decide what is or is not appropriate for themselves or their children. ICRA makes no value judgments about sites.

The descriptive vocabulary was drawn up by an international panel and designed to be as neutral and objective as possible. It was revised in 2005 to enable easier application to a wide range of digital content, not just websites.

New developments coming onstream include Quatro, a project funded by the European Union, which will integrate content labels with quality and trust marks. ICRA also intends to launch a service to verify the accuracy of ICRA labels and to provide this information to third-party tools and services, such as search engines.

ICRA's corporate members include AOL, British Telecom, Microsoft, T-Online, and Verizon. ICRA has been supported by the European Union's Internet Action Plan and various trusts and foundations. Through the Associate Membership scheme, individuals can join and support the work of the organization.

StephenBalkam
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