2. Some background
• The British Broadcasting
Corporation (BBC) is the UK's public-
service broadcaster.
• It is the world's oldest national
broadcasting organisation and the
largest broadcaster in the world.
• It produces news articles, television
and radio programmes 24 hours a
day.
• Somehow that content needs to be
findable.
3. The BBC in 1997
Hand
curated
links
and
index
pages
8. Access to our ontologies and objects
Our
ontologies
define the
domains of
our news,
sport and
music
pages
9. Our programmes archive offer
• Only brand
specific,
bespoke
archives
• Expensive to
create and
maintain
10. ADA
What about the rest of our programmes?
No existing
bespoke
hierarchy
will work
for all of
the topics
we cover
11. But do we really want a hierarchy
anyway?
Just as we no longer
use directories for the
web, we need to look
beyond hierarchies for
programmes
12. Homophily and user experience
Homophily (i.e., love of the same) – people like things
that represent their worldview.
The more links you present, the greater the trust in your
links.1
1. Ilan Lobel and Evan Sadler. Preferences, Homophily, and Social Learning. In
Operations Research, 2014
17. ADA
• We began working with the In Our Time archive
• It provides a broad and varied range of topics to explore
Basic onward journeys Limited, manually curated categorisation
19. ADA• Feedback has been positive and constructive
Just a quick look delighted me … I can find all sorts of stuff I never knew existed
The new beta categories database is SUPERB!! Congratulations to the programmer. Truly
wonderful. Many, many thanks. Any chance applying it to other science-type podcasts ?
Really ingenious – like it a lot, suggests connections, stimulates interest
Thanks for arranging the categories of In Our Time. I would absolutely love TV programs to be
this accessible. Not ones chosen by experts or highlights of, but all of whole series arranged so
that one can follow ones own interests.
This is a marvellous development! Google can be rewarding, but your development plugs us
into a more manageable field of knowledge – one that’s nevertheless wide ranging and high
quality. I love the joining-up.
IOT's beta site is simply the single best I've experienced. Now that I have
experienced it, I don't want to use the current site's format.
20. ADA
• A single subject input automatically generates a wide range of categories
• No need for producers to think about categories/genres
Subject input ADA service processing Categories generated Connections created
dbpedia.org/resource/Ada_Lovelace
ADA
service
dbpedia.org/resource/Category:1815_births
dbpedia.org/resource/Category:1852_deaths
dbpedia.org/resource/Category:19th-century_English_mathematicians
dbpedia.org/resource/Category:19th-century_women_writers
dbpedia.org/resource/Category:Ada_(programming_language)
dbpedia.org/resource/Category:British_computer_scientists
dbpedia.org/resource/Category:British_countesses
dbpedia.org/resource/Category:Byron_family
dbpedia.org/resource/Category:Computer_designers
dbpedia.org/resource/Category:Deaths_from_uterine_cancer
dbpedia.org/resource/Category:English_computer_programmers
dbpedia.org/resource/Category:English_computer_scientists
dbpedia.org/resource/Category:English_people_of_Scottish_descent
dbpedia.org/resource/Category:English_scientists
dbpedia.org/resource/Category:English_women_poets
dbpedia.org/resource/Category:Lord_Byron
dbpedia.org/resource/Category:Programming_language_designers
dbpedia.org/resource/Category:Women_computer_scientists
dbpedia.org/resource/Category:Women_in_engineering
dbpedia.org/resource/Category:Women_in_technology
dbpedia.org/resource/Category:Women_mathematicians
dbpedia.org/resource/Category:Women_of_the_Victorian_era
largest broadcaster in the world by number of employees, with over 20,000 staff in total.
Just in the UK - 9 TV Channels, 56 radio stations (10 national radio stations, 6 country-wide radio stations and 40 local radio stations, plus world service.)
Launched in 1997, the website was hand coded, and all the links manually checked.
It’s now updated by means of content management and automated content publishing systems.
We publish programme schedules automatically through playout systems, so every programme has a page, they are not always easy to find.
The news app allow people to follow a single subject.
Our music pages are also dynamically populated, content from Wikipedia and Musicbrainz populates the page, while any content we create that is tagged with the artist name will be added to the page.
Published openly, free to use.
Although, news, sport and music are now being published dynamically, there’s still no automation for the rest of the programmes
Slide 3. The difference with programmes
Structure
Sport is already structured (teams, leagues,etc)
Parliament/constituencies likewise
News had editorial structure in the first place, Business > Companies, Economy, etc
Some programmes have a hierarchy, but inconsistent, K&M , IOT, DID comparison.
Relevance: date of publishing much less relevant with study topics.
• “We decided to see if we could user the user-created content of Wikipedia to create automated navigation…”
• Wikipedia holds rich – and despite its reputation, accurate! – info on almost every subject
• NEXT SLIDE ZOOMS IN ON CATEGORIES
• “The principle is quite simple, each programme is about a subject and that subject already has categories attached in Wikipedia…”
• Since the categories are entered by people according to what they think is important, they are as editorially valuable as crowdsourcing, without the effort and inconsistency of doing this ourselves over a large dataset.
• “Using the Wikipedia tags we were able to construct queries to extract all of the category data and check how many categories matched across different programmes...”
• “The whole process only takes a couple of minutes per programme and gives and average of 7 categories per programme…”
• “540 matching categories were found in total…”
• Some intriguing links and connections can be found – Connections that sometimes aren’t immediately obvious but are extremely insightful
• “Starting with the In Our Time archive because it has a broad range of subjects…”
• In Our Time is perfectly suited to experiments around categories– Such a broad range of topics
• The existing archive is manually categorised with a small set of very high-level groupings
• Automatically create and maintain these new connections – Programmatically