The Sift project

ICRAplus was developed with financial assistance from the European Union under the Internet Action Plan and brought together three partners:

Optenet - a leading internet access control solutions provider. Based in Madrid and San Sebastián, Optenet managed the project and carried out the bulk of the development work. Optenet's comprehensive filtering solution uses both URL lists and content analysis, and is available for use with ICRAplus.
The National Centre for Scientific Research "Demokritos." Based in Athens, Demokritos is the largest government research institute in Greece. Its Internet Content Filtering Group, part of the Software and Knowledge Engineering labs, has developed an Artificial Intelligence agent that can be "trained" to classify content according to any set of criteria in any language. The AI agent, known as Filterix, is available for use with ICRAplus.
The Internet Content Rating Association. Based in the UK and the US, ICRA operates a global, cross-cultural system that allows content providers to add machine-readable descriptions to their own material. The rating vocabulary and ICRA's principles of transparency are at the heart of the ICRAplus system. More practically, its previous demonstration software, ICRAfilter, forms a large part of the central ICRAplus unit.

Full details of the Sift project, its objectives and how they were met are available from a dedicated website at www.sift-platform.org. For details of the EU's Internet Action Plan, see www.saferinternet.org.