The SELECT protocol allows Internet users to supply their ratings of Internet documents, and to use ratings provided by other users to filter and select what to read In particular, SELECT supports so-called collaborative filtering. By this is meant that the filtering and selection for a particular user is made based on ratings provided by special groups of raters, such as peer groups, people with similar values, interests and expertise as the person for whom the selecting and filtering is done.

The SELECT functionality is downwards compatible with PICS [PICS 1, PICS 2], but a major difference is that while PICS is mainly oriented towards keeping out unsuitable information from children (blacklisting), SELECT is mainly oriented towards helping people find the best and most valuable information for them on the Internet (goldlisting). A syntactical difference from PICS is that the encodings in SELECT are using the XML encoding format.

Latest version of the SELECT proposal in
Plain text, IETF style
PDF format
Postscript format

This protocol has been submitted as an IETF draft.

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