Use of semantic web on the BBC

O uso que a BBC tem feito da web semântica permite não apenas ao leitor encontrar mais rapidamente informação na interface da rede de tevê inglesa e conteúdos relacionados fora do espaço BBC como transformar a base de dados em APIs para criação de novos conteúdos. Reproduzo aqui o trecho que me parece mais contundente. A íntegra está no w3.org.


"The BBC Search Team is building on this newly-available linked data, by creating pan-BBC aggregations of content. These new pages are called Search+ —an indication that we are using this data to enhance the standard search experience. Each Search+ page shows the best content on its particular topic from around bbc.co.uk, and sometimes selected content from outside the BBC. The set of topics that make up the Search+ Pages essentially form a new BBC Controlled Vocabulary (CV) of concepts and entities. Each term in the BBC CV has an associated DBpedia resource, to enable us to use some of the metadata within DBpedia, and also enable links between our CV terms (and associated Search+ pages) and content both inside and outside the BBC. We also intend to use sources other than just DBpedia (e.g. Musicbrainz and Geonames) to provide these “Linked Open Data” associations in the near future.


Various groups around the BBC have contributed to the Search+ project, and we have a fledgling suite of tools to allow people within the BBC to manage the life cycle of the Search+ pages and the data used in them. These tools allow us to: associate DBpedia resources with content pages; then promote those DBpedia resources into the BBC CV in a controlled way; build the associated Search+ pages for those terms in the BBC CV; include additional pieces of content on those Search+ pages—both from inside and outside the BBC; and to monitor the quality and usage of the Search+ pages.

Conclusions

Creating web identifiers for every item the BBC has an interest in, and considering those as aggregations of BBC content about that item, allows us to enable very rich cross-domain user journeys. This means BBC content can be discovered by users in many different ways, and content teams within the organisation have a focal point around which to organise their content.


The RDF representations of these web identifiers allow developers to use our data to build applications. The two issues, providing cross-domain navigation and machine-readable representations, are tightly interleaved. Giving access to machine-readable representations that hold links to further such representations, crossing domain boundaries, means that much richer applications can be built on top of our data, including new BBC products. In addition the system gives us a flexibility and a maintainability benefit: our web site becomes our API. Considering our feeds as an integral part of building a web site also means that they are very cheap to generate: they are just a different view of our data.


The approach has also proved to be an efficient one—allowing different development teams to concentrate on different domains while at the same time benefiting from the activities of the other teams. The small pieces loosely joined approach, which is manifest in any Linked Data project, significantly reduces the need to coordinate teams while at the same time allowing each team to benefit from the activities of others.

Key Benefits of Using Semantic Web Technology

• Usability—Making a site around the things people care and think about.
• User Experience—Having meaningful predicates and granular, addressable resources, so that those resources can be visualised in new ways.
• User Journeys—Allowing users to make their own journeys across our content. On the BBC /nature, users can start making their own documentaries. They can start on an animal, watch a programme clip, follow a link to a related habitat, read about that habitat and so on…
• One page per thing—Making our resources part of the Web and therefore linkable and discoverable.
• Our web site is our API—One URI for both machines and web browsers. Our web site can be used by third parties to create new products, e.g.,URIPlay, TestTubeTelly, FanHubz or Channelography^(*).
• Loosely coupled development—Different teams can work together in a loosely coupled fashion. Each team focuses on their domain of interest."