Backstage.bbc.co.uk

People's Choice Winner

Its always good to see innovative uses of BBC data and content, but to be awarded a prize too is even better. Ian Tweedie from the UK entered the Boxee challenge of creating a application/plugin for boxee. He won the peoples vote for video. Taken from the readwriteweb,

Boxee-user Ian Tweedie was disappointed with the selection of Boxee applications available to those outside of the US. While UK-users could already access BBC’s iPlayer, Tweedie created BBC Live in just 10 hours to take the title as the first developer to bring live TV to European Boxee audiences. Says Tweedie, “I’m just a normal guy living in the UK trying my best to find a job whilst using my free time to learn and tryout fun new things… The dev challenge seemed the perfect excuse to dive in, because if TV isn’t electronic heaven, I don’t know what is.”

Boxee is certainly gaining momentum with its open infrastructure and being across almost all platforms. Its a very good story of how commercial companies can learn and build upon open source and free software. Boxee is build on its bigger geeky brother XBMC, which has already captured many peoples imagination. Backstage gave a talk at the art of design workshop recently where we encouraged content producers to put there content on the web openly and use RSS to make it machine readable. Just like the Open University plugin which didn’t win but was noticed by The Guardian , it was easy to build the gui around the solid base of rss feeds and videos of the Open University’s content.

Recently there’s been talk about what events BBC Backstage have done in the North.  Instead we’ve been waiting and watching, I would say becoming a good citizen and looking where it makes sense to get involved. The BBC Manchester building on Oxford Road isn’t ideal for large events unless we use a studio.However since the Ubuntu 9.04 launch party which crammed about 80 people into our BBC Bar, we’ve been thinking about the ability to maybe support some kinds of camp events.

DrupalCampManchester was discussed ages ago and Dan did a great job putting the whole thing together. Being the host, I just stepped in when needed. Everything went well and a special thanks to Herm and Derek for there help. The only complaint we had was the heat which is currently broken. But generally there were about 80 smiling faces at the peak but even on Sunday the numbers didn’t drop far below 50. Its certain the drupal uk community is certainly a lot tighter since this event.

From a BBC point of view, the event was relatively simple and cheap to host. The biggest cost is actually peoples time to help out. Having someone else also run the event took most of the management out of it. So whats next? TED-X Manchester seems to be next but the dates are TBA. Currently we’re masterminding the idea of a Friday afternoon with a suitable event to follow it into the night.

The Linked Open Data approach to nurturing a next-generation Web is getting lots of attention recently. At the BBC, we’ve been involved in this approach for the past year and a half or so. It looks to be very promising indeed.

To explain Linked Open Data, Sir Tim Berners-Lee wrote:
“It is about making links [between datasets], so that a person or machine can explore the web of data. With linked data, when you have some of it, you can find other, related, data.”

Over the last few months we’ve been continuing our expansion of the amount of Linked Data that we’re publishing on the BBC /programmes and /music sites, to provide additional detail about episodes of radio and TV programmes, and more links between the data exposed from each site. So, for example, we’re now exposing segment data for Radio 2 & 6 Music programmes that link the artists in each section to the relevant data on the /music website.

This provides some really nice ways to navigate and mash-up the two websites. But we’ve also been wondering: what else could we do? What if there was a way to not only retrieve the data that underlies each page on the website, but also a way to run queries across the whole datasets? This would provide a way to do even more with the data, allowing it to be sliced, diced, queried and analysed in all kinds of new ways.

With this in mind, we’ve asked two companies who specialise in Linked Data technology (OpenLink Software & Talis) to start regularly crawling the BBC /programmes and /music websites to harvest all of the data and load it into their semantic web platforms. Both platforms allow you to search and query the BBC data in a number of different ways, including SPARQL — the standard query language for semantic web data. If you’re not familiar with SPARQL, the Talis folk have published a tutorial that uses some NASA data.

Talis & OpenLink are regularly crawling and updating the data, and we’re working with them on ways to make sure it stays as up to date as possible, but for now expect it to lag a little behind the live data on our sites. But these triplestores already contain metadata for over 300,000 radio and TV episodes, over 6000 series, more than 4000 album reviews, and additional data about thousands of music artists and albums. All of the BBC subject categories and programme genres are also included, so there are plenty of ways to query and slice up the data whether you’re interested in a particular type of programme, channel, artist, or person. Where our data links to DBpedia, we can include some additional context — so for example, all of the music artist information can be queried from one source. And, as we add more data to the /programmes and /music sites, this will all get added.

The Talis Platform

The combined /programmes and /music data is in a store called “bbc-backstage” whose API is
available from: http://api.talis.com/stores/bbc-backstage. The Talis developers have already put together a few example queries and demos which query the dataset, these show how to query the data using AJAX, e.g., fetching lists of music reviewers and their reviews, or analysing relationships between categories of TV programmes.

The OpenLink Virtuoso Platform

The Virtuoso hosted data can be found and queried via http://bbc.openlinksw.com/sparql. In addition, the OpenLink provided Linked Data space offers a faceted browser interface, engine, and REST API, alongside a collection of sample queries.

A richer BBC data API, based on Linked Data

This is a trial project that we’re running for six months to explore what the Backstage community can do with BBC data when it’s exposed through a richer API than we’ve been able to provide thus far. We’re excited to see what you can create, and in the feedback you can provide us — so we can learn what works and what doesn’t, and make changes. So please do keep us up to date through the BBC Backstage email list.

Enjoy!

Today we’re launching the second pilot for R&DTV, we’re really excited as we have learnt so much from working on the first episode and from the feedback we received from you all. We feel that we’ve improved on a lot of areas and await your feedback again.

This episode includes motion graphics, music, subtitles and we’ve improved the sound. It features our intrepid trip to the UK’s first Maker Faire in Newcastle, David Kirby on the BBC R&D Ingex project and interviews from Matt Biddulph CTO of Dopplr and Jason Calacanis CEO of Mahalo.com.

If you missed the first episode, R&DTV is a pilot show, designed to be shareable, remix-able and redistribution. It was built for the internet era and we release all the assets which make up the show under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial license. The show its self, features interesting tech stories inside and outside the BBC. We’re also looking at how we distribute content in various encoding methods and formats.

We’ve deliberately taken a ‘different’ approach to creating the content, one which doesn’t include working in a studio or with elaborate production methods to show that you can do create interviews inexpensively and with off the shelf kit. There’s a emphases on this being something you can do.

R&DTV is a collaboration between BBC Backstage and RAD teams, who are: Producers Rain Ashford and Hemmy Cho, as well as Exec Producers: Ian Forrester, George Wright and Adrian Woolard.

So this is how you can enjoy R&DTV:
1. A brief 5 minute video, containing all the very best bits
2. A longer 30 minute video, containing deeper conversations
3. The Asset Bundle, containing everything we used and didn’t use to make the video edits

Where you can find Episode 2 of R&DTV:

• R&D TV: Episode 2 - the 5 minute cut in Flash format (45.3 MB)
• R&D TV: Episode 2 - the 5 minute cut in Quicktime format (104.2 MB)
• R&D TV: Episode 2 - the 5 minute cut in Ogg Theora format (29.2 MB)
• R&D TV: Episode 2 - the 5 minute cut in Matroska format (40.1 MB)
• R&D TV: Episode 2 - the 5 minute cut in AVI format (40.4 MB)
• R&D TV: Episode 2 - the 5 minute cut in MP4 format (26.0 MB)
• R&D TV: Episode 2 - the 30 minute cut in Flash format (266.7 MB)
• R&D TV: Episode 2 - the 30 minute cut in Quicktime format (655.8 MB)
• R&D TV: Episode 2 - the 30 minute cut in Ogg Theora format (155.0 MB)
• R&D TV: Episode 2 - the 30 minute cut in Matroska format (242.5 MB)
• R&D TV: Episode 2 - the 30 minute cut in AVI format (244.5 MB)
• R&D TV: Episode 2 - the 30 minute cut in MP4 format (170.5 MB)

We would like to thank everyone who contributed to this episode: Gids Goldberg for the subtitles, Tom Barton for the music, Alia Sheikh, Ant Miller, Cy Thompson & Andy Gibb for Maker Faire, Frank Considine for filming at FOWA, David Allen for Eastenders VT, Theo Jones & Pete Warren for titles, Ciaran Anscomb for tech support and not least Malcolm Warren who was Editor.

Don’t forget we’d love to see anything you’ve created with the assets and please do give us your feedback, both here on the blog or email rdtv [at] bbc.co.uk.

Following our launch of the Tweet store, Steve Bowbrick pointed me at this interesting post from the Twitter API blog.

I see a lot of interest in taking a group of users’ tweets and repurposing them as content on another site. For instance, consider a news agency with reporters maintaining active Twitter accounts. This hypothetical agency often wants to display their tweets on the company website.

One thing about corporate entities is they like to pay for services like these because cost communicates longevity, value, and quality. Creating a service that will group tweets, strip out irrelevant content (e.g. @replies), and allow efficient syndication is something worth paying for. You’re only limited by the amount of value you can add to the stream and the chosen method of redisplay.

Are you working on this? What niche are you targeting?

Well we like to think we can do a lot more that just repurpose content on the site. There is so much more interesting data that can be used.

It wasn’t only Philip who presented at Futuresonic 09. Simon Cross and Ben Smith of BBC Future Media and Technology also gave a talk about the social semantic side of the BBC. Their presentation is here for us all to enjoy.

Next09 have recently made videos available from the 2009 event. Backstage had the pleasure of talking on a panel alongside Robert Amlung of ZDF (germany’s 2nd public broadcaster). The difference in strategy and achievements are quite apparent from the video. Don’t forget to check out some of the other excellent videos on the next video site. Here’s a list of ones we highly recommend.

• Introduction and Keynote with Jeff Javis
• Digital Vertigo with Andrew Keen
• When money talks and Capitalism 2.0
• Emerging Social Behaviors on the Web, Including Microblogging

Techbus’s first journey happened during Thinking Digital. Backstage had the joy of being on the bus or rather luxury coach. The coach picked me up a little later that expected due to the traffic into Manchester but it was already half full with people from Liverpool. The bus/coach was huge, like something you see superstars or football teams stepping out of rather that geeks with laptops. It turns out that the coach is actually Bolton Wanderers team coach.

Onboard there was everything needed for a unconference including wifi, electrical power and plenty of healthy food and drink. The wifi did drop out while in the middle of the county because the wifi was reliant on a 3g connection, but most of the time it was fine.

The best thing about the techbus was the people onboard, your with them for a few hours and so your talking about the conference and related things. Katie Lips who’s idea it was from the start become the host for the bus tour and made sure everyone was moving around and meeting other people.

The tour was a success, and there’s already talk of the next tour being from London to Liverpool for B.tween in June. So if you get the chance to join the tour, make sure you get a ticket early, I can certainly see this venture growing. Great work Katie

Our coverage of Futuresonic is completed with a post from the eyes of 3 BBC R&D engineer’s.

Last week the Contact theatre in manchester played host to the Social Technologies Summit as part of Futuresonic 2009, an urban festival of art, music and ideas. Stowe Boyd’s radical Digital Futures keynote explored the way the web is changing social interaction, observing a progression from mainstream media to decentralised participative networks and suggesting that a new form a tribalism may arise.

The Digital Economy panel gave a series of short presentations exploring the relationship between user experience and bandwidth, with a particular focus on the rise of gaming technologies. Increasing bandwidth (the ‘fat pipe’) and accelerating convergence lead to a bright future for creative producers including games companies. As well as the overall convergence of digital platforms, Enda Carey discussed how his organisation Northwest Vision&Media is supporting development of creative media industries in England’s North West. Funding and support for individuals and small businesses are at the heart of NW V&M’s business, including an active involvement in preparing for the arrival of MediaCity.

The BBC’s own Philip Trippenbach gave an excellent talk on the use of games for good. The power of engagement that games yield makes them an excellent mechanism for delivering factual and educational content as well as entertainment. Philip shared the challenge of creating a shift in the perception of games; it is accepted that television can tackle contentious issues through dramatisation but games are often seen to trivialise their subject matter, despite the fact that some efforts produce more accurate depictions than film could ever achieve. Both Philip and Toby Barnes of Pixel-Lab made it clear how important games are going forward. They both believe that games are valuable learning tools as well as being a source of entertainment and expression, and provided a wide-ranging list of existing games that demonstrate the current trends in game development as technology progresses. Overall the panel made it clear that the game industry is an important aspect of the future digital economy, and provided plenty of food for thought to any traditional media stalwarts in attendance.

The Identity and Trust stream focussed on the responsibility of large social networks to nurture the trust of their users, particularly children, giving them confidence in their identity and relationships. This seems to contrast with the desire to utilise the powerful marketing capabilities made possible by the wealth of personal data generated by users. Rachel O’Connell of Bebo is working to ensure that children can use emerging technologies safely, with applications that can educate and empower them. She discussed the challenges they are facing and overcoming using the example of ubiquitous access to support networks such as the Samaritans through social networking sites. The danger seemed to me to be finding the line between these altruistic aims and the marketing power that Bebo offers to commercial clients. There’s always a danger of young people’s trust being abused, or their ownership of data undermined, and we must tread carefully.

Ewan McIntosh of the 4iP fund gave an inspiring presentation entitled, “The Death of Industrial Education” which was much clearer on the issue of trust. He suggested that in some networks trust should be upheld through anonymity, whereas in others, personal data should be gathered transparently and minimally with an incentive to provide information. McIntosh attacked the current state of education, suggesting it is a throwback to the industrial revolution where children were seen as a captive audience to be ‘taught at’. He explained how social networks form part of a more suitable environment in which education can flourish.

Tristan Thielmann presented what was billed to be ‘a madcap, humourous response’ to Drew Hemment’s 2006 claim that new thinking in locative media will help resolve the climate change crisis. Perhaps the fact that this is not my field prevented my from entirely grasping his arguments, but his final point that you shouldn’t trust data unless you yourself collected it seems like a very romantic ideal that would be impractical for most to follow.

Friday afternoon looked to be better than the morning, with the semantic web up for discussion. Although this is something that people have been talking about for a quite some time, the theatre there did seem to have quite a palpable buzz around what Tom Ilube described as a tide-like phenomenon; slow, but unstoppable. The explanation of the semantic web as the transition from documents to data seemed clear enough, but following the twitter feed of the event showed that there was a fair bit of uncertainty of what the semantic web actually means on a practical level. Later, the BBC’s own Simon Cross and Ben Smith gave an interesting insight into what bbc.co.uk might want to do with data rather than documents. The development of areas such as /music and the /programmes ontology highlights the BBC’s increasing commitment to opnenness and collaboration, just one example being the use of MusicBrainz identifiers for /music rather than our own proprietary IDs. As Simon and Ben put it, when you link your data to other open data sources, amazing things happen.

One of the most enjoyable sessions was Aaron Koblin’s talk on data visualisation. He proves that great swathes of seemingly trivial data can not only be made understandable, but also beautiful. From his well-known work on visualising flight paths to some fantastic work on the SMS traffic on Dutch mobile networks, his work is well worth a look. He has also produced some interesting art - both visual and musical - based around soliciting the contributions of thousands of individuals via Amazon’s Mechanical Turk. Very social indeed.

Overall a great few days. Next year, Futuresonic returns as Future Everything, and the BBC will doubtless be there too.