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Notice 1 Notice 2 Notice 3 (12-03-2003)

Karl Donert will today present initial findings from the research being undertaken as part of the European Safer Internet POESIA Internet filtering project at the European Commission in Luxembourg. This is part of a seminar “Lessons learnt: The next generation of Internet safety education” being held at the European Commission. Liverpool Hope has been responsible for coordinating End User activities including a European survey of decision makers in educational establishments. Hope is also a main partner in the new SAFEBORDERS Project funded as part of the European Commission Internet Action Plan (IAP). SAFEBORDERS seeks to establish a European campaign for a Safer Internet for young people. This follows the recent Conference “Protecting and Educating Children in the Information Society: lessons from European Projects” organised last month by European Schoolnet and the European Commission in Barcelona.

The main POESIA research findings identify that while there are similarities in the overall concerns and perceived needs of many education organisations, there are significant cross-cultural differences in their activities and with the approaches and attitudes of decision makers to the Safer Internet options that they provide in their schools, colleges, universities and libraries across Europe. For example, a major finding shows while most UK organisations tend to have already adopted some Safer Internet solutions, those in Spain and Italy have not. These findings are likely to have a significant impact on the types of promotional strategies that need to be employed in the future under the forthcoming European Commission eSafe Programme.

Karl Donert and Shelley Lockett, the newly appointed SAFEBORDERS Project Research Manager, will also attend the official hearing and launch of the new eSafe research programme at the Commission in Luxembourg on Wednesday and Thursday this week before meeting with SAFEBORDERS Project partners on Friday.

It is anticipated that these research findings might be significant in informing those concerned with the future development of user-suitable Internet filtering strategies and in setting European standards for filtering options. It is hoped that this might lead to even larger-scale research to assess and analyse the educational End User cultures in Europe and the impact that different national and European policies might have on decision making at local, regional and national levels. Liverpool Hope has thus become one of the leading research agencies in Europe working in these areas.

POESIA stands for Public Open-source Environment for a Large Safer Internet Access. The project plans to develop a multi-lingual filtering product that will protect users in educational organisations against harmful Internet content. The POESIA Project is supported under the Safer Internet Action Plan initiative (http://www.saferinternet.org). It started in February 2002 and lasts for two years.

The POESIA Project seeks to develop, establish, evaluate and promote Internet filtering software that will improve on existing solutions. The POESIA system will seek to meet end user needs by filtering several channels (such as Web and email) by providing advanced content-based filtering, both on the basis of textual and image content by combining innovative technologies.

Filtering products that use content-based filtering techniques examine incoming content and outgoing requests to determine if they appear to be unacceptable. These products employ a variety of methods such as looking for key words, phrases, analysing images and looking for known characteristics of undesirable content. POESIA implements a combined system of these techniques described. Filtering will thus cover a range of modes, including image filtering, natural language text filtering (for English, Italian, Spanish and at a later stage for French), URL, PICS and JavaScript filtering.

A unique feature of the POESIA project is that it is developed as an open-source (http://www.opensource.org/) or free filtering software system. This entails that every piece of software developed under the POESIA project is released under a free software licence, usually GPL or LGPL in source code form (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/). This source code is viewable, reusable and improvable by peer developers, and will be compiled into executables to produce working filtering software. Open-source software permits the wide deployment of filtering systems in many educational institutions. Free availability of POESIA software will be available from the POESIA Web site (http://www.poesia-filter.org), where those interested can also register to receive regular updates.

End User research has been undertaken to inform software development. The survey interviewed decision makers, advisors and experts in educational establishments. They were considered to be the key audience in determining the likely use of an Internet filtering option. The research demonstrated that while there are similarities in the overall concerns and perceived needs of many education organisations, there were some significant cross-cultural differences in their approaches and attitudes to the safer Internet options that they provide in their schools, colleges, universities and libraries across Europe. For example, while most UK organisations tend to have already adopted filtering solutions, those in Spain and Italy have not. These findings are likely to have a significant impact on the types of promotional strategies that need to be employed in the future under the forthcoming European Commission eSafe Programme. The full research report is available from http://www.hope.ac.uk/ebs/poesia/.

The POESIA Project includes ten European partners from Italy, Spain, France and the UK. The team includes research foundations, universities and companies. The project partners are the Istituto di Linguistica Computazionale (Italy), Commissariat à l’Energie Atomique (France), Fundació Catalana per a la Recerca (Spain), the Ecole Nouvelle d’Ingénieurs en Communication (France), Universidad Europea de Madrid (Spain), Sheffield University (UK), Liverpool Hope University College (UK), M.E.T.A. S.r.l. (Italy), PIXEL Associazione (Italy) and Telefónica Investigación y Desarrollo S.A. Unipersonal (Spain).

Karl Donert, International Fellow and Senior Lecturer, donertk@hope.ac.uk
Liverpool Hope University College, UK

The 8th of May POESIA project was presented in Madrid at the ministry of Science and Technology within the frame of the "Internet Segura" ("Safe Internet"), an awareness campaign conducted by the FCR. Among the speakers there were Mr. Richard Swetenham (director of the Safer Internet Action Plan), Mr. Leopoldo González-Echenique (Director of the Information Society development program in Spain) and Mr. Lluís Jofre (Director of the Fundació Catalana per a la Recerca). Over 90 people attended to the seminar.

Mr. Àlvar Caimons presented the aim of POESIA project and the results of the questionnaire conducted at the initial stage of the project addressed to educators and decision-makers.