Ofcom, the independent communications regulator in the UK, is tasked with implementing the Online Safety Act, which was passed by Parliament in October 2023. This groundbreaking legislation represents a significant shift in how online platforms are regulated, placing greater responsibility on online services, including social media platforms, search engines, pornography sites, messaging apps, gambling and gaming platforms, to proactively ensure a safe and secure online environment for all users, particularly children.
Ofcom has built regulatory capabilities in a completely new domain, encapsulating UK online safety law. As such, although there are a few published taxonomies for online harms, we are not aware of any previous attempts to create a comprehensive ontology for online safety. Ofcom has grown rapidly as an organisation, both in size and understanding of this new regulatory domain, which has led to challenges in maintaining common vocabulary and coherent reference data management. Since we are now at a stage of transition from policy making to compliance and enforcement, our data and information requirements have changed, along with an increasing need to describe our data consistently.
This talk will describe the journey we’ve been on to develop a taxonomy for online safety, and how we are using as it as a vehicle for increasing literacy around data management, including reference data, data modelling, business glossaries, data cataloguing and analytics using common definitions of terms.