BBC's online future: A matter of semantics?

The BBC's recently launched semantic web music project could indicate the future direction of the corporation's online presence.

The public beta of the BBC Music website has been recently relaunched incorporating semantic web technology in its artist pages resource.

The BBC artist pages, a repository of information on singers and bands played on several BBC radio stations, has been running as a closed beta project since June 2008 but with the launch of the new BBC Music website, its semantic web tech has now been exposed to the wider public.

For the BBC, the site represents a new way of thinking about online content - where the priority is publishing data rather than simply publishing web pages. Such thinking is likely to filter through to other parts of the BBC with discussions taking place between editorial departments on how to aggregate and meaningfully link data.

Matthew Shorter, interactive editor for music at the BBC, told silicon.com: "We're kind of on a journey of moving from what's effectively a magazine/print publication-based metaphor around web publishing… to a world where we recognise that that's not the way that people use the web."

"We're working towards a scenario where we really don't want to see any dead ends between bits of the BBC online offering," he added.

The semantic tech is not the only improvement on the BBC Music site. The way in which the BBC's online music resource is constructed now makes it easier to search for content due to the way it's been tagged and linked to other content, according to Shorter.

"From an SEO point of view, once we start generating a lot of meaningful links among our pages, then we're going to improve the find-ability of our content via web search which is a part of our strategy of doing this."

The BBC is also making its music-related application programming interfaces (APIs) available for third party developers so they can reuse the content - in a similar way as YouTube and Flickr.

The open platform could see individuals use the artist play-count data as shown on the BBC Music homepage and display it in a different way, for example.

"By having as open a platform as we can, then our hope at least is that people will pick up that content and do things with it and we'll benefit from incoming links as a result," Shorter said.