On 15 March, INHOPE is launching a common ontology for the categorisation of child sexual abuse material. This ontology was created as a part of the Global Standard Project and aims to define and normalize terminology that is utilized by Industry, Hotlines, Non-Government Organizations (NGOs), and Law Enforcement regarding Child Sexual Abuse Material (CSAM).

What is the Global Standard project?

Funded by End Violence Against Children, the goal of the Global Standard Project is creating a common ontology for the categorisation of child sexual abuse material (CSAM) schemas to, in turn, facilitate better collaboration for identifying illegal material, to aid in the creation of annotated datasets for the training of automated CSAM detectors, and produce more relevant reporting, all for the purpose of better victim identification capabilities and more effective processing of CSAM by hotline analysts, law enforcement officers and technology industry professionals.

How was the ontology created?

The foundation for the ontology was developed from a diverse array of existing ontologies and categorisation schemas, including but not limited to the International Categorisation Collaborative (IC3) developed by Argos at Queensland Police Service Australia and INTERPOL DevOPS, the US Industry Standard, the NCMEC categorisation system, the Intelligrade system developed by the Internet Watch Foundation, and Project VIC. For the past 9 months, an international working group of experts from law enforcement agencies, the largest INHOPE hotlines, NGOs in the field, and technology partners have used the foundations of this body of work to develop the ontology.

The ontology was developed to meet the needs of all stakeholder groups involved in the categorisation or implementation of CSEM/CSAM-based datasets for a diverse range of purposes. This is made possible through a standardisation of the terminology relevant to determining the illegality of Child Exploitative content, whether the information is used for the minimum purpose of assessing illegality, to the more granular content-based and context-based use cases for machine learning and training. This ontology forms the basis of a system to aid in the determination of illegality of media for a given jurisdiction regardless of categorisation schema and legislation.

What does the Global Standard ontology aim to do?

• Realign Machine Learning efforts for automated CSAM detection
• Normalize language and terminology to facilitate better compatibility between systems and hash sharing
• Improve collaboration between sectors
• Reduce exposure on investigators
• Improve victim identification capacity
  
  

Join the Global Standard team on 15 March for the launch of the ontology and learn about how this practical solution will improve inter-sector collaboration and reduce exposure on analysts, investigators, and content moderators.

This webinar will be held over two sessions to accommodate as many time zones as possible. Please note: sessions will be held on Teams, make sure you have the ability to access and join Team sessions.

You can register for both sessions through the links below:

Session 1 - 09:00 CET on 15/03
Session 2 - 21:00 CET on 15/03

Following the launch, the ontology will then be made available upon request to select relevant stakeholders for testing and mapping their internal systems & schemas. If you’re interested in receiving more information about the ontology, send a request to globalstandard@inhope.org.