BBC Backstage: APIs & Feeds 2009

What is Backstage?

the BBC’s developer network

encourage & support UK developers

a license similar to CC non-commercial with a few extra clauses

champion ‘open culture’ around the BBC, releasing data, feeds & APIs

a community - advocating th e internet world, and the individuals/communities who participate in it

Backstage website/blog: http://welcomebackstage.com

Data, Apis and Feeds

http://ideas.welcomebackstage.com/data

News and Sport Feeds http://backstage.bbc.co.uk/data/NewsFeeds?v=1b5j

News Headlinrd

News Headlines UK Edition

News Headlines World Edition

Last 50 stories published by BBC News Online

News in Other (non-English) Languages

UK News in Welsh

Breaking News Feed

Most Popular News

News Headlines on Mobiles

Enhanced Mobile Version News Feeds

News and Sport rss search http://backstage.bbc.co.uk/data/SearchApI?v=ri3 http://newsapi.bbc.co.uk/feeds/search/news+sport/{searchterm}

This API allows you search for the top 20 stories around a search term. Results are returned as RSS 2.0

Community Forum Feeds http://backstage.bbc.co.uk/data/UserGeneratedContent?v=gcs

BBC Community Feeds from DNA sites around bbc.co.uk

Feeds from recently updated pages [without any personal ID] from BBC DNA sites

Updated: ad-hoc but often by the minute

Travel Data http://backstage.bbc.co.uk/data/TravelFeeds?v=138u

TPEG (Transport Protocol Experts Group) data outlining up to the minute travel conditions from across the UK

Top Travel stories

UK road data

UK local travel data

Public Transport data

Weather Feeds http://ideas.welcomebackstage.com/node/17 http://newsrss.bbc.co.uk/weather/forecast/0008/Next3DaysRSS.xml

BBC Weather provides a number of RSS feeds. Some require a Location ID. You can find this by searching for the location you require on the website and looking in the page URL

Three day forecast

Latest observations

UK observations are updated hourly. International locations tend to be updated every three hours.

Entertainment Feeds http://backstage.bbc.co.uk/data/EntertainmentFeeds?v=twc

Top Stories from the BBC around Entertainment

BBC Comedy blog

BBC Films – Interviews, News and Releases

Dr Who News

/programmes

http://www.bbc.co.uk/ programmes

Programmes provides a persistent web presence for almost all of the BBC's TV and Radio programmes.

/programmes for developers http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/developers

the service is under active development - and we continue to release enhancements every few weeks.

XML, YAML, JSON, RDF, Atom and RSS

is guided by a couple of underlying principles: that of 'linked data' and the BBC's Fifteen Web Principles.

Programmes Ontology

Alternate serialisations

Microformats

/music http://www.bbc.co.uk/music/

Music is a service from the BBC providing a persistent web presence for music used across the BBC's Radio shows and programmes. Aggregates musicbrainz, wikipedia metadata with BBC metadata

/music for developers http://www.bbc.co.uk/music/developers

XML, YAML, JSON, RDF, Atom and RSS

The site has been developed against the principles of linked open data and RESTful architecture where the creation of persistent URLs is a primary objective. The initial sources of data are somewhat limited but this will be extended over time

/programmes + /music sparql interface

http://ideas.welcomebackstage.com/node/19

http://ideas.welcomebackstage.com/node/19

http://bbc.openlinksw.com/sparql

http://api.talis.com/stores/bbc-backstage

Two triple stores containing the combined /programmes and /music data linked together

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

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

Historic programme guide http://backstage.bbc.co.uk/feeds/tvradio/

Daily snapshot of BBC TV and radio 7-day listing information available in the TV-Anytime (Tar-Gzipped, XML) data format.

The data is originally sourced from the BBC's scheduling system but undergoes some manipulations in order to provide TV-Anytime features. The availability, content, organisation and features of the data may change at any time

http://backstage.bbc.co.uk/feeds/tvradio/doc.html - TV anytime schema

TV Anytime API

http://www0.rdthdo.bbc.co.uk/services/api/

A API is built on a TV-Anytime database (the same as used for the BBC Backstage 7-day TV/Radio feeds) and you can use it to extract information in TV-Anytime format. We have also provided a simple response format, giving quick and easy access to information.

World Service news store http://ideas.welcomebackstage.com/node/16 http://mammoth.welcomebackstage.com/exist/rest/feeds/world-service

Full text news stories published by the World service for non-commercial use

This is a growing data store of all the language sites on the World Service. Every story is stored in ATOM and made available with its full text in this database store. Currently all the data is stored in a XMLDB which you can access via its REST interface. Only BBC Persian.com is currently available, but other languages will follow in the near future.

BBC Tweetstore http://ideas.welcomebackstage.com/node/15