Online Harms Taxonomy Library

About

An open knowledge graph of online harm taxonomies from regulators, researchers and other sources - so people and AI tools can compare them, cite them and see how they relate.

The Online Harms Taxonomy Library (OHTL) collects published taxonomies and typologies of online harm, such as those in regulatory guidance, maps each one to a common open schema, and will publish the result as linked data using W3C standards, so they can be compared, cited and reused.

Coming

  • Published taxonomies In RDF, with each version tied to the exact source edition it was built from.
  • An open schema Built on the W3C SKOS standard, so taxonomies can be linked and compared.
  • Crosswalks Showing where categories in different taxonomies match, overlap or differ, open to review and challenge.
  • Archived sources A permanent, citable copy of each source edition: in an official archive, in an open repository where the publisher's terms allow, or in the Wayback Machine.

Source types

OHTL brings together eight types of source:

  • Statutes and bills For example, the UK Online Safety Act 2023, which lists priority offences and categories of content harmful to children.
  • Regulatory guidance and codes For example, Ofcom's Codes of Practice and guidance, which explain how services should comply with the Online Safety Act.
  • Reporting templates For example, the DSA transparency reporting categories, which providers of intermediary services in the EU must use to report their content moderation.
  • Standards and multi-stakeholder typologies For example, the World Economic Forum's Typology of Online Harms, agreed by industry, governments, civil society and academia.
  • Platform rules Rules on what users may post - for example, Meta's Community Standards for Facebook, Instagram and Threads.
  • Classifier label sets The categories a system scores content against - for example, OpenAI's moderation categories.
  • AI use policies Rules on what customers may use an AI model for - for example, Anthropic's Usage Policy.
  • Research taxonomies For example, the CO:RE 4Cs, which classify online risk to children as content, contact, conduct and contract risks.

See the full list of sources.