The World Association of Newspapers and a global coalition of publishing and media groups held a conference in London on 26 June 2007 to unveil the progress of the Automated Content Access Protocol (ACAP), a new standard to allow online content providers to automatically communicate information to search engine operators and others on how their content can be used.

Launched in October 2006 and on schedule to be completed by the end of 2007, ACAP is designed to encourage owners of high quality content to make their work easily available online and also help avoid complex and costly legal disputes between content providers and search engines.

"ACAP has that air of 'rightness' about it, a proposal and solution which seems to make sense to most people we talk to, whether they’re publishers, politicians, journalists and even search engines – ACAP just makes sense," said Gavin O'Reilly, President of the World Association of Newspapers.

ACAP is developing a language that will allow publishers to state permissions information in a standardised format that can be read by the web "crawlers" that are used by search engine operators and other content aggregators to search and index online content. No such system currently exists to enable the search engine operator to systematically comply with such policies on how this content can be used.

With ACAP, a newspaper web site could, for example, allow all search engines to index its content, but only allow selected search engines – those who have paid a royalty or have a commercial agreement – to display articles, and, if they so choose, only for a limited time. It would also allow all images to be properly attributed, as they are in the newspaper.

ACAP’s final conference will be held on 29 November 2007 in London.

For more information, visit www.the-acap.org.

Source: WAN