Chief Technical Officer
Family Online Safety Institute
Science and technology have always figured prominently in Phil’s formal education and private passions. Nevertheless it was a varied career path which lead to him joining ICRA (now FOSI) in April 2000.
For 7 years Phil worked in local radio in different parts of Britain as a commercial script writer, producer, voice over and presenter. After undertaking 2 years of training he then worked in one of Britain’s oldest woodlands as Assistant Warden and Education Officer! The traditional woodland management at Bradfield Woods, Suffolk, [2] has remained unchanged since 1252 AD and it was Phil’s job not only to help to continue that management but to understand the ecology and to explain it to others. Audiences ranged from local primary school children to Cambridge University Extra Mural studies students.
Worthwhile, fulfilling and about as stress-free as work can be, wildlife conservation does not make much of a financial contribution to a household and, now married, Phil took up a part time lectureship in media studies and resumed advertising copy writing. Lecturing engagements included several visits to the Beijing Broadcasting Institute and China Central Television; copy writing included work for a multi-national hi-fi manufacturer and an educational web site for Britain’s leading solar scientists.
The mix of skills gained along the way means that not only does he understand the technology behind the ICRA system, but can communicate it effectively to techies and policy makers alike.
Since the beginning of 2003, the focus of Phil’s work has been the integration of the ICRA system into the worldwide effort to create the “Semantic Web.” This involves working with a variety of technical experts in developing methods to make it quick and easy to add machine-readable descriptions to large amounts of content. ICRA’s move from PICS to RDF in 2005 is part of this ongoing effort.
Phil represents FOSI within the W3C and is an active member of the Mobile Web Initiative’s Best Practices Working Group [3]. Among other things, this group is responsible for defining the “mobileOK” trustmark. This is highly relevant to the Quatro project [4] from which comes Phil’s other major activity within W3C, chairmanship of the Protocol for Web Description Resources Working Group (POWDER) [5]. This in turn followed on from the Web Content Label Incubator Activity [6], the first activity of this kind within the Web’s leading standards body.
Phil Archer lives with his wife and two young children in Ipswich.