The
Programmes
ontology
Tom Scott & Nick Humfrey
BBC FM&T for Audio & Music
Clearly the BBC broadcasts a lot of programmes both on TV and Radio - but until recently we haven’t
done a wonderful job of supporting these programmes on the web.
What we would like to talk to you about today is a recent project - to provide all BBC programmes a
permanent web presence and to formally describe and model this information through an ontology.

Historically
The BBC has been providing
programme support for sometime
The BBC has been building programme support websites for a while now - all the radio networks have
websites and the major TV shows also have sites. So the BBC does have a legacy of providing
programme support - unfortunately there are problems.
For starters it’s not complete - most programmes don’t have webpages and the support sites that do
exist aren’t comprehensive, they don’t provide a complete record of a programme... for example
generally we haven’t published episode pages.
So there are gaps. Also...

Historically
But the data has been siloed...
flickr.com/photos/sheeshoo/13902422/
The data has been siloed - it’s not easily accessible to the rest of the web.
The data is trapped within a bunch of web pages - with little or no thought for machine consumption.
Historically our focus has been on building microsites for end users - hand crafted html pages,
without a consideration for their semantic mark-up. Let alone exposing the data in a structured
fashion via an API.

Historically
...and ephemeral
banksy.co.uk
And unfortunately we also have a tendency to delete our web pages or reuse our URLs.
So the data we do make available doesn’t hang around on the web.

Historically
...which is a shame because we
broadcast between 1,000 and 1,500
programmes a day
flickr.com/photos/jamescridland/18768141/
During the week and excluding local radio programme the BBC broadcasts about 1,500 programmes a
day.
So if we can solve these problems then we can make a lot of useful metadata and media available to
the web.
And this is where BBC Programmes comes in.

/programmes
BBC Programmes launched in
October aims to solve these
problems
We launched BBC Programmes last October with the aim of providing every programme a permanent,
findable place on the web.
We also wanted to make a fully fledged web 2.0 citizen; exposing BBC Programmes using the
principles of Linked Data.
We wanted to make a RESTful API exposing the data in a variety of formats for people and machines.

One page per programme
At the heart of this service is the idea of one URL per programme. Or more accurately a page for every
Episodes, Series and Programme Brand.
All with unique IDs - and persistent URLs

Useful aggregations
Date (schedule)
Genre
Format
A-Z
Topic (coming soon)
We’ve also publishing a bunch of aggregations for example genre, format, schedules.
And in the very near future by subject or topic and music artist.

Design approach
Identify your resources
Make them addressable
Combine resources to make a page
banksy.co.uk
I wanted to touch on our design approach because it has made our lives very much easier when
developing the ontology and in creating alternate views.
How we’ve gone about this is to first identify our resources - those things that we want to reuse or let
people consume.
Once we’ve done that we need to make them addressable at persistent URLs. So that each resource,
each concept has it’s own URL
And then combine those resources into public facing web pages. In other words each of our web pages
are made up of reusable resources.

Resources
So for example if you take an episode page it’s made up of...

Resources
Embedded Media Player (iPlayer)
The embedded iPlayer

Resources
bbc.co.uk/programmes/:id/credits
A list of cast and crew. Addressable at /programmes/:id/credits

Resources
bbc.co.uk/programmes/:id/broadcasts
And a list of broadcasts at /programmes/:id/broadcasts (not currently linked in)

Mobile representations
Different set of resources
Different view
This means that we creating alternate representations relatively straightforward.
We’re working on a mobile view. But rather than creating an entirely separate parallel site or applying a
mobile css to the existing site we adopted a third option.
Instead we can pick and choose from a common set of resources but combine them in a different
fashion to create a mobile site optimised for that platform.
And the same logic applies when creating the RSS, RDF or any other machine views.

Linked data
JSON
YAML
XML
RDF
Microformats
flickr.com/photos/jazzmasterson/3038597/
All we need to do is decide what resources need to be made available and a set of specific views to
create different representation of this data for machines to consume.
We’re in the process of making RDF, JSON, RSS, ATOM, iCal views. Oh and by the way all the html
pages are marked up with microformats.
We are doing all this with the objective of make it as easy as possible for people to integrate with our
content.
And this resource centric approach has made this job easier - it also made designing the ontology very
straight forward - because in essence the resources were the classes within the ontology.
We designed the site to be a web of data from the outset.

The ontology
Brands
Series Programme
Episodes purl.org/ontology/po/
Content
Publishing
Service
(Creative Commons license)
Version
Event Broadcast
This then is the ontology.
Its released under a creative commons license so anyone is free to use it or modify it
It provides web identifiers for the concepts that make up a tv or radio programme such as brand,
series, and episode. It’s divided into two main parts. First, it captures categorical information about
programmes, and the relations between such categories.

The ontology
Brands
Series Programme
Episodes
Content
Service
So the content.
A programme must have at least one episode but multiple episode can be grouped into one or more
series or a brand.
You can think of series and brands as a decorator pattern to the episode.
In any case an episode or set of episodes grouped into series and brands constitutes a programme
which in turn is then owned by a service, such as Radio 1 or BBC 2.

Brand
So for example Waking the Dead programme brand.

Series
Which is currently in it’s 7th series.

Sub series
Each weekly story is divided into...

Episode
Two individual episodes.
All these are independent of the broadcast - and it is these content objects that are the primary,
addressable resources within BBC Programmes. Not the individually broadcasts.

Episode
It’s worth noting at this point that the idea is not for Programmes to become a new brand nor portal.
Rather all the major brands - those with existing sites - will incorporate these pages into their sites.

The ontology
Service
Publishing
Version
Event Broadcast
The other half of the ontology addresses the publishing of that content.
An episode can have multiple versions - for example Torchwood has an adults and a children’s
version.
A service broadcasts a version.

URL design
bbc.co.uk{/:service}/programmes/genres/:genre
bbc.co.uk/bbcone/programmes/genres/music
Our primary focus when it came to designing the URLs for BBC Programmes was to ensure that they
remain persistent – with each URL representing a single concept.
What we’ve ended up with are two classes of page: aggregations and objects.
The aggregations are human readable, easily hackable and return a list of objects. They include
schedule views, aggregation by genre, format and a to z.
For example, here is the url for a list of music programmes on BBC 1

URL design
bbc.co.uk/programmes/:id
bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00b257s
The objects however follow a simpler pattern:
bbc.co.uk/programmes/:id
Where :id is an eight digit alphanumeric code.
We’ve been asked before why the urls are opaque
Our decision to use opaque URLs was driven by the need to provide persist identifiers. If we had
included information about the programme brand (e.g. the Today Programme) or service (e.g. Radio 3)
then there would have been a high risk that the URLs would have either changed or no longer reflected
the ‘owning’ brand since programmes are often rebroadcast on different services. By stripping the URL
back to a unique identifier we removed any future (or current) ownership issues.

Show me the data
Each representation is addressed by
appending the name of the appropriate
serialization to the end of the URL
Currently we have XML, YAML and JSON representations for the various schedules.
These can be accessed by added the name of the appropriate serilisation to the end of the URL.

Show me the YAML
bbc.co.uk/bbcone/programmes/schedules/
london/today.yaml
This is BBC 1’s london schedule for today as YAML.

YAML
This is what you get

Show me the XML
bbc.co.uk/radio4/programmes/schedules/fm.xml
Or Radio 4’s FM schedule as XML

XML
Returns this

RDF
Not quite live yet (sorry)
Try it out at:
http://bbc-programmes.dyndns.org

RDF

RDF

RDF

The near future radio POP
More representations
SPARQL interface
APML
XMPP
Music and more
Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow
In the very near future we’ll be launching with more representations: for example iCal, Atom, RSS
and all of the view - not just the current limited set.

SPARQL
D2R Server
Maps relational database to RDF
Around 5 million RDF triples
By using D2R to map the relational database to RDF we can expose the data via a SPARQL end point.
Through the use of SPARQL, we can query the data using a variety of constraints that cannot be easily
expressed through the Programmes web interface. We are also able to semantically connect to external
data sources such as DBpedia to provide extra information that is not present in our dataset, such as
date and place of birth of cast members.

APML
Programmes pay attention to artists
and topics
bbc.co.uk/programmes/:id/apml
flickr.com/photos/jonasb/1429721252/
Programmes can be thought of as paying attention to music artists and topic. For a while now we’ve
been feeding the artist data into Last.fm.
The plan is to expose this and data about topics (people, places, time periods and subjects) as APML.

XMPP Pubsub
Allows a person or application to
publish information so that an event
notification (with or without payload) is
broadcast to all authorized subscribers
http://flickr.com/photos/kaelr/2078003992/
We’re also investigating the use of XMPP - as a way of pushing epg data to interested devices, both
programme metadata and 'on now' notifications
Of course this does mean that you need a pub-sub client i.e. one that can handle the XML output. Of
which there aren’t very many!

XMPP Publish Message
If you do get your hands on a client this is what you get.
At the start of every radio broadcast XMPP publishes metadata about that show to its station's node,
wrapped in an Atom Entry. For your Linked Data entertainment it's also serialised as Turtle RDF
conforming to the Programmes Ontology.
If you would like to find out more have a look at the BBC’s Radio Labs blog.

XMPP Pubsub
Extra bonus demo...
[last minute hacking from Patrick]
http://flickr.com/photos/kaelr/2078003992/
Programmes ontology over XMPP notifications via Growl

More of the graph
Music, events, people,
topics and more
What I’ve been talking about today is the work on Programmes - we are also working on exposing
music information in a similar fashion. One page for every artist the BBC plays.
And Ben Smith, who is also talking at XTech, is working on the user end of the graph.
That leaves Topics - which will be connected to Programmes next month. And events - live events -
which is a little way off.
And - we’re in the process of adding:
- World Service
- The back catalogue (75 years of data)
- Local Radio

Thanks to
Michael Smethurst Patrick Sinclair
Yves Raimond Matt Wood
Paul Clifford Duncan Robertson
Jamie Tetlow Rija Menage
Steve Butler
Finally we would like to thank those that have done most of the work.
And if you are interested in joining us there we’re currently hiring software engineers.

Questions?