Semantic Web BBC Workshop
Danny Ayers (Semantic Web developer and evangelist) recently asked this question on the Semantic Web mailing list State of the Semantic Web - personal opinions?. So I ran a workshop last week aimed at answering the question: "What is the state of the Semantic Web in the BBC?" Judging by the response to the event, the answer is: pretty good.
I am an Information Architect in Future Media & Technology, so I sit somewhere between technology and user experience design. This balance was also represented in the choice of speakers at the workshop who came from both a technical and a design background.
Audio & Music Interactive has always been at the forefront of the drive to bring the Semantic Web project to the BBC. Michael Smethurst and Matt Wood gave an overview of the Semantic Web project and talked about some of the things A&M are working on. They have previously blogged in more depth about how /music and /programmes relate to Linked Data. It also looks like work has started on modelling food and gardening.
Michael Atherton from Search & Navigation presented a very entertaining talk about the future of BBC Topic Pages and navigation badges. Navigation badges will be powered by a semantic tagging service called the BBC Metadata Services API (the BBC version of OpenCalais, if you like, but with web-scale identifiers).
I followed with a short presentation discussing the work Chris Sizemore and I have been doing regarding the use of Wikipedia as a controlled vocabulary and the role of DBpedia.
Ant Miller talked about the variety of projects coming out of BBC Research & Innovation and the role the Semantic Web will play in liberating archive content.
Zac Bjelogrlic and Simon Cross talked about the projects coming out of the BBC Internet team. Zac discussed the issues around OpenID.
We were lucky enough to have two distinguished external speakers, Dan Brickley and Alexandre Passant. Dan talked about OpenID's relationship to the Semantic Web and outlined a number of scenarios in which it could be integrated into the BBC website.
Finally, Alex introduced his work around making web 2.0 services more semantic in particular social networks (SIOC) and user tagging (MOAT).
The Q&A session at the end raised some interesting questions. One apparent pattern was that the questions regarding the user experience of these projects - as opposed to the technologies involved - were actually harder to answer for the panel.
I think this reinforces the fact that the Semantic Web is not purely a technology-driven project but needs the help of many disciplines to ensure its success. To quote Vincent Maher:
They will tell you it's about artificial intelligence, acronyms such as RDF, object-oriented data structures and meta this and hypertext that. The bottom line is this: the Semantic Web is about bringing information to life.
Silver Oliver is an Information Architect in FM&T. Photo of Silver by Jeremy Keith, from Flickr, used under Creative Commons licence.
Comment number 1.
At 01:56 27th Aug 2008, njslabbert wrote:Excellent point made above, ie that the semantic web is a multidisciplinary (and I would say interdisciplinary, which is not the same thing) enterprise. It is indeed about bringing information to life, which is why it is directly -- and to some no doubt surprisngly -- related to the subject of philosophy. This consideration has not yet been sufficiently explored and is filled with enormously exciting possibilities. -- Nicholas J. Slabbert
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Comment number 2.
At 12:22 3rd Jun 2009, IanDBailey wrote:I just set up a meetup group for semantic web folks in London - see https://www.meetup.com/LondonSWGroup/
--Ian
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