Web Content Filtering

Abstract

Across the years, Internet has evolved from an academic network to a truly communication medium, reaching impressive levels of audience and becoming a billionaire business. Many of our working, studying, and entertainment activities are nowadays overwhelmingly limited if we get disconnected from the net of networks. And of course, with the use comes abuse. The World Wide Web features a wide variety of content that are harmful for children or just inappropriate in the workplace. Web filtering and monitoring systems have emerged as valuable tools for the enforcement of suitable usage policies. These systems are routinely deployed in corporate, library, and school networks, and contribute to detect and limit Internet abuse. Their techniques are increasingly sophisticated and effective, and their development is contributing to the advance of the state of the art in a number of research fields, like text analysis and image processing. We review the main issues regarding Web content filtering, including its motivation, the main operational concerns and techniques used in filtering tools’development, their evaluation and security, and a number of singular projects in this field.