Opportunities and Organisation of Cross-Border Online Labelling

With regard to online content, the relevance of labels for educational initiatives of parents is decreasing. In addition, many media outlets offer dynamic or user-generated contents which impedes static classification or simply makes it impossible. The Hans-Bredow-Institut has worked with researchers and practitioners for many years in order to develop realistic opportunities for more flexible and comprehensive approaches toward classification in digital environments. The objective is to build on the existing broad knowledge of classification and learnt labels.
One of the analysed approaches, the Global Alliance Matrix (GAM), aims to aggregate classifications for content with existing ratings and to unify their significance with the help of context and culture-related algorithms in a way that "culture-neutral” information is provided regarding youth protection relevance. This approach is done by using a big data-based approach. The objectified data basis can then be interpreted by technological protection applications on the parent-side. A prefix ensures that evaluation and filters apply according to the individual education style.
Regarding unlabelled content, the GAM approach is examining possibilities to use instruments on the provider-side, on the user-side, and on the user group-side for labelling which enables a matrix-compatible classification. The goal is to establish a unified language for the description which can be used irrespective of media, device, and location (see MIRACLE).

From 2012 to 2014, Stephan Dreyer was the head of the “Technical Task Force on Interoperability and Machine-Readability” of the “CEO Coalition to Make the Internet a Safer Place for Kids.” The task force discussed possible cross-sectoral and cross-border data models for future standards of electronic age classification.