Landmarks and Ratings

I've been working on the landmark system for a Second Life map project, and I wanted to ask for some input especially on the ratings. To me the idea of ratings is to help people know what to expect. Also if you have explicit ratings it makes features like filters or searches more practical. I figure two kinds of content people are often interested in knowing about are sex and violence, whether they want to find it or avoid it, so I think those should be standard ratings in some form or other. Also I don't think a ratings system should try to convey everything. A shared landmark should include a description and people should use common sense.

One thing I realized is that there's a distinction between what's allowed at a place versus how extreme it might get. You might have an art gallery that shows anything, only a small amount of it sexual, but there might be no limit on how extreme it gets. On the other hand you might have a gallery focused only on erotica, but it doesn't show anything more hardcore than what you'd find in a magazine like Maxim. If you simply rate the first gallery X and the second one PG-13 (using movie ratings just for example), I think you're missing something pretty important.

At first I thought about two categories of ratings, one for the intensity and another one for how appropriate or likely the content is. But now I'm considering not having a rating for "intensity" at all. Just something like "None - Some - A Lot - Essential". So in the example above the first gallery would have a sex rating of "Some" and the second gallery would have a sex rating of "Essential", and people would have to depend on the description for a better idea of the content.

But I'm open to ideas. Below are the properties I currently have for landmarks. If you have any thoughts on ratings or landmarks in general, I'd be interested in hearing them.

Name
Sim
Coordinates
Category (Home, Retail, Game, Club, Art, Casino, Venue, Park, Attraction, Religion, etc)
Description (short, 512 characters)
Access (Private, Open, Fee)
Place Owner
Landmark Creator
Date Landmark Created
Sex Content
Violence Content

I considered things like this when designing Landmarker but eventually decided that allowing a tag-oriented categorization system would end up being a little more flexible. Considering how fast things move in SL, what may be "Essential Sex" and a club one week might be "No Sex" and someone's private home the next.

In the Landmarker design, the actual location is separate from the bookmark itself. This is so that one location can point to multiple "interpretations" of that spot, some more recent and accurate than others.

But then, it sounds like you have a goal in mind that is more taxonomic categorization than just "I'll remember this for later".

Thanks for the reply, Cienna. I hadn't looked at Landmarker recently, but I'll check it out again now that I'm working on landmarks.

I think a tag system is a good idea, and I'm not ruling it out for the future. I'm trying for something simple and predictable to start with. For instance, I want my map app to be able to show unique icons at least for the most common categories of places (clubs, homes, etc) and to be able to filter out mature content to some extent, "out of the box". Also what I'm planning is for people to share landmarks peer-to-peer and to subscribe to lists of landmarks, so I'm thinking a common taxonomy of some sort would be helpful.

I can see why you'd want to seperate the location from the bookmark, it seems like a smart design. In my case there won't be a central database of locations, so I'm not sure if it would work. I'm including the landmark creation date; maybe that will make it easier to detect stale landmarks.