BBC Music relaunch: Linked Data goes Business?
Since SWC is involved in a couple of semantic web projects in the media industry, I was watching for the BBC Music relaunch. Now the new platform is online – and from an enduser’s perspective the new system offers comfortable ways to navigate through the world of music: Bands, their members, biographies and outgoing links like to Wikipedia or MySpace are retrieved from MusicBrainz and mashed up with BBC blogs, playlists or reviews.
Matthew Shorter, interactive editor for music at the BBC, told silicon.com:
We’re kind of on a journey of moving from what’s effectively a magazine/print publication-based metaphor around web publishing…to a world where we recognise that that’s not the way that people use the web.
No doubt: Linked Data is a great deal for the end-users but what´s in for the providers, in this case for BBC?
From a media company’s perspective Shorter has mentioned a handful of interesting arguments why linked data could be useful:
- reusing data from MusicBrainz and Wikipedia also provides better value for the licence payer as the BBC isn’t wasting resources reproducing data already in the public domain
- from an SEO point of view, once we start generating a lot of meaningful links among our pages, then we’re going to improve the find-ability of our content via web search
- by having as open a platform as we can, then our hope at least is that people will pick up that content and do things with it and we’ll benefit from incoming links as a result
This could be summarised as follows (by adding a fourth item):
- re-use existing data
- increase find-ability
- extend your eco-system
- understand users’ interests
By saying that linked data can help providers to understand their users in a more profound way which is based on the more granular way how information is offered in the linked data world (paradigm shift: page versus linked data) I´d like to ask a short, value-free question: Which side of the internet will drive the business in the future – the visible web or the deep web? Was linked data designed only for the visible web?
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- BBC Tests Web 3.0 Technology for Music (businessweek.com)
- BBC Music Website Relaunch (bbc.co.uk)
- BBC’s Semantic Music Project (readwriteweb.com)
- Linked Data In(ter)action (blogs.talis.com)
- Linked Data is not owl:sameAs Semantic Web (semantic-web.at)
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April 8th, 2009 at 12:58 pm
My question is how is someone got involved in projects like this? The question might be strange to say, but the reality is, most industrial IT projects are utilizing the same old patterns, there is little room for innovation…
I’d be interested in stories where in some project it was decided to implement new technologies, which were not mature. It would be interesting to hear the concerns and the responses which led still to a new semantic implementation.
April 9th, 2009 at 9:02 pm
@barna: One pointer is the project performed for the Oslo municipality. Completely based on open standards, partly being immature. Commercial project, actually leading to a successor project.
http://www.estc2008.com/index.php/program/program-list/48-norheim-and-engels
April 14th, 2009 at 11:58 am
[...] Source: Andreas Blumauer / The Semantic Puzzle [...]
April 15th, 2009 at 1:36 pm
Great to see this being picked up and covered in such enlightened quarters. @
barna: in answer to your question, we didn’t really see these technologies as immature. Quite the contrary – the fact that the likes of Flickr and YouTube had already built category-killing offerings out of linked data were something of a wake-up call to us in the BBC. We were also pushed in this direction by the complexity of what we do in the music space. In order to pull together all of our disparate activity as a broadcaster, we have to have a system that was dynamic and flexible. It’s also part of our public service remit as the BBC to be open to the web, both in order to support the wider ecology, and to provide useful routes into good external content for our users, and this was frankly the only sensible way to do it. Finally, we had a critical mass of visionary technologists and open-minded managers that enabled us to take on a new approach.
April 15th, 2009 at 2:02 pm
Hi Matthew, thanks for this comment. It also shows that Linked Data isn´t a trial balloon anymore and it offers on top of new technologies also new ways to build an ecosystem around data.
I would also be interested if you @ BBC have already considered some new ways to mashup ads and your (music related) content with semantic web technologies.
Do you see any relations to the ongoing discussion about Phorm?
April 16th, 2009 at 10:12 am
Hi Andreas,
The short answer is that bbc.co.uk doesn’t carry advertising, so this territory is basically off limits to us. The slightly longer answer, that would relate to the controversies around Phorm, is that all the ideas the BBC’s currently exploring around personalisation and recommendation are informed by the fundamental principle that users should own their own data and be comprehensively informed about what’s being done with it, with the ability to opt out if necessary.
April 16th, 2009 at 12:26 pm
Hi Matthew,
this makes BBC and its Linked Data Initiative even more attractive! I would like to ask you for more information on this fundamental principle, because I think that your use case should become kind of a best practice for the LOD World. Thanks again!
April 16th, 2009 at 7:17 pm
Hi Andreas,
Matt’s asked me to join in here as I’m helping to build some of the new services on bbc.co.uk around ’socialness’ which will be appearing in 2009 and 2010.
We’re all massive fans of linked data as I’m sure you all are – and the benefits as summarised above are clear.
Where is gets really exiting, is where you begin to allow user to interact with that data in cool ways: becoming fans of artists, listening to tracks, attending events. And sharing that activity with other people across the LOD cloud. Thanks to semantic web technologies like FOAF and SIOC, we can expose that data in linked-open-data ways too.
However, with personal activity data, and sharing such data on the web – we have to be really careful. We’re strong believers in the principal that the User owns their data. They should be able to see it, share it and remove it. They should also control who they allow to see it – for example, people you trust should probably be able to see more than people you don’t.
One of our challenges with allowing users to expose their activities in LOD-style ways is to explain to them the power of the consequences of their actions. If you publish that you’re a fan of something, watched something or read something – or allowed it to be automatically published – then you might have a hard time removing that data once its been crawled by any RDF client.
Publishing cool data like the guys in bbc.co.uk/music and bbc.co.uk/programmes do is just the first step – but how we deal with publishing user-activity data in these ways too is a significant challenge – one we’re working hard on, and one we’ll crack… with the communities help!
S
April 16th, 2009 at 10:44 pm
Thanks Simon, your response sounds like BBC handles the Linked Data topic very responsible. This is the most sustainable way to develop such a system. You say: “…in the principal that the User owns their data” but on the other way you think that the most exciting thing of linked data is that they express their preferences in a machine-readable way (SIOC, FOAF). You ask for more actions “…to explain to them (the users) the power of the consequences of their actions.” That sounds like a logical consequence to deal with all the potential dangers in a proper way. But how do you – as a major european medium – want to deal with such a challenge? Hopefully not with yet another privacy policy, impossible to read for an average end-user…
December 1st, 2009 at 4:41 pm
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