A Social Semantic BBC?

A Social, Semantic BBC? Simon Cross & Ben Smith @sicross @thesmith Futuresonic, Manchester, May 2009

A quick introduction to the Semantic Web at the BBC

Linked Open Data Cloud

But the BBC has all this content.

...like loads of it.

How do people ﬁnd it?

But what’s the best recommendation engine on the planet?

People

Its all about... Social Discovery of Content

Part 1: Semantic Questions

Some typical Semantic Web examples...

“show me all the music artists born in Germany on a Thursday who’ve had a number one single in the last 20 years”

“show me the senators of the US Sentate who’ve been to Harvard who have also done an MBA”

“show me all the musicians who’ve had number one singles in more than 15 countries with more than one band”

“Show me all the occurrences of a disease in one country where somebody travelled to that country from Mexico in the last 2 weeks”

“show me the rainfall in the constituencies of all the current UK MPs who’ve claimed for a moat, or a bathplug”

Ace! But what if I want you to...

“show me all the programmes my friends have watched in the last week that I haven't yet watched”

“show me all the news articles my friends have bookmarked in the last month that I’ve not yet read”

“show me which of my friends has watched and listened to the same kinds of programmes as me in the last 6 months”

“show me the radio programmes my friends have listened to in the last week that I have also listened to”

“show me the programmes, news stories, sports stories and events I've rated that my friends have rated very differently to me”

Wouldn’t that be the coolest way to discover new stuff?

Part 2: The Semantic User

So, there’s all that lovely linked data, but do you have to build yet another social network?

http://daveman692.livejournal.com/341074.html

FOAF+SSL Distributed Social Networks

Great, but do you still have to: ‘CREATE TABLE users’?

Er, yes. performance scalability provider lock-in fair trading assertions aren’t good enough Users just don’t get it!

So how do you build social discovery, without building a social network?

Develop on the Open Stack Don’t try to own your user’s social graph Authenticated links to social networks rel=”me” and owl:sameAs

Can we answer the questions then?

Er, No.

Part 3: Semantic Activities

We need to link Users to Content through Activity

It’s all about Nouns and Verbs

Nouns Verbs watch listen read comment rate share follow attend ...

Nouns Verbs Users watch Programmes listen News Articles read People comment Places rate Subjects share Sports Teams follow Festivals attend ... ...

“Simon watched Top Gear”

“Ben is going to Glastonbury”

“Rich listened to Radiohead”

http://rumplo.com/tees/tee/1141-im-so-adjective-i-verb-nouns

• OpenSocial Activities • ActivitiyStrea.ms • SOIC • FOAF • Event Ontology

Can we answer the questions then?

Er,Yes, hopefully!

6 Steps to heaven if you too want to work this way...

1. Structure your data.

2. Publish as linked open data

3. Capture Activity (user interactions with your data)

4. Derive meaning from Activity and the Social Graph

5. Publish derivations back to the Users

6. Users ﬁnd cooler, better, newer content

Thanks! Any Questions?

http://blogs.zdnet.com	236
http://www.blogweb.co.kr	120
http://welcomebackstage.com	94
http://www.zdnet.com	26
http://www.litmanlive.co.uk	25
http://www.slideshare.net	17
http://www.richardmorland.co.uk	16
http://linkeddata.uriburner.com	11
http://www.bbc.co.uk	10
http://www.techgig.com	3
http://www.virtualsheep.co.uk	1
http://translate.googleusercontent.com	1

A Social Semantic BBC?

by BBC Web Developers on May 21, 2009

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A Social Semantic BBC? — Presentation Transcript