“How Metadata Will Drive Content Discovery for the BBC Online”

From the BBC Tech and Creativity Blog:

Metadata is the background info that describes the things we make. It can come in all forms, from technical metadata such as which camera was used in a film shoot to promotional metadata used to describe the plot of a programme. For the remit of this project, we’re focusing on what we call descriptive content metadata – tags that describe what an asset (e.g. an article, programme or TV/Audio clip) is about or who/what it mentions. That’s already used in areas like the BBC News and BBC Sport websites using data architecture called Dynamic Semantic Publishing that was created for the London 2012 Olympics, and now drives many thousands of subject-based aggregations, or Topic pages.

There are also categories of programmes on BBC Sounds and BBC iPlayer, which use a mixture of genres and formats contained in the PIPs database that supports our vast online library of programme information. As a result of these two data silos, and their limitations, it’s difficult to offer audiences any pan-BBC experiences or anything that requires an in-depth understanding of the content.

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Filed under: Data Files, Libraries, News, Publishing