Blue Fountain follow up

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We should get this sent out quickest; either by email or on paper, or both.

Cover letter

From: Blue Fountain

Dear BBC,

I gave a pitch to James Xxxx on 4 April, the final day of NW labs. Although it was outside the original brief (Nations and Regions), he said it was something the BBC could definitely work with. Mathew Cashmore said earlier in the week that there was the possibility of a contribution to his Hack Day.

Our proposal was to build parts of the Semantic Web relating to particular types of civic data to a quality that the BBC could rely upon to enrich its own services and serve the community. This idea is not new[1] and it is evident that the BBC is very much engaged with the movement[2] with regards to its own data.[3]

However, there could be considerable advances if the BBC decided that it was within its remit to arrange for these standards to apply to third-party civic data where there was no functioning process for it ti do so.

Currently, third party data of this nature is gathered and supplied location-wise by the BBC for weather information and elections. These two data feeds fit into a far wider world. Ideally there needs to be a detailed information survey of how it would all look in the future, as well as a careful assessment of the practicalities in each case. Small companies could then bid for contracts to supply each of the different data feeds as their usefulness becomes apparent. This method of procurement appears entirely consistent with the BBC's Web2.0 project.[4]

I have included the exact proposal we pitched at NW labs in Annex A. Although we don't know what Mathew Cashmore has in mind regarding Hack Day, Julian Todd has included an idea for consideration in Annex B.

Please don't hesitate to contact me if you have any questions. I frequently travel to London and would be happy to arrange an appointment.

Yours etc,

Aidan

[1] "Forgiveness, Not Permission: Retro-fitting the Semantic Web onto British Democracy", Tom Loosemore, March 2005, http://conferences.oreillynet.com/cs/et2005/view/e_sess/5947

[2] "Making Links at the BBC", Talis.com, March 2008, http://my.opera.com/tomheath/blog/making-links-at-the-bbc

[3] "BBC and IBM strike 'web 3.0' deal", The Guardian, March 2007, http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2007/mar/05/bbc.newmedia

[4] "The BBC’s Fifteen Web Principles", BBC2.0 Project, February 2007, http://www.tomski.com/archive/new_archive/000063.html

Annex A

Missing people

The goal would be for the BBC to provide a link to a specific missing person in your area on the same page as the latest story about the Madeleine McCann saga.

Show example slide of the story with inset here

To do this requires the BBC to know where you live (a feature that has recently appeared on the main web-page when it asks for your post-code), and for the missing people information to be gathered from a number of sources into a database.

Show slide of police and missingpeople webpage pointing into database

The page for each missing person (eg, on the police website) would need to be text-parsed for home address and location where they were last seen.

Show slide highlighting the fields of information

This would be a job for the contractor to undertake -- that of maintaining a public database in Semantic Web form based on the source information.

Show slide detailing the diagram of boxes and information flow

Feedback about the click-throughs should be returned to the database if possible to assess performance. This information could be used to answer questions, such as: "If a reader sees a note about a missing person in their own area, how much more likely are they to click on it than if it is of a missing person in another city". In other words, does this localization actually have any effect?

There wasn't time to include a similar case study involving lottery grant projects and unclaimed prizes, but the details are relatively straightforward to work out once you know the sources of data.

Annex B

Hack Day idea

I went to the Hack Day in 2007, and made some new friends. One thing that would really add to the fun would be if there was some kind of networking between the teams.

Most hacks or mashups involve scraping and parsing the data from one source into a database of some kind, followed by retrieving that data and presenting it in another form.

Suppose the BBC provided teams access to a database through an easy-to-use API where they could store their scraped data. Given some prepared functions for mashing up data from this database, results could happen very quickly, creating time for more sophisticated ideas to blossom.

If this database was visible to everyone on the network, each team could discover and access records deposited by another team. Points would be awarded to that other team who took the trouble to upload the useful data.

For example, if someone scraped and uploaded the locations of all the skateboard parks in the country and used it on a mash-up of the country, another team could have built a travel planner designed for scheduling pub-crawls from one location to another. A tiny adjustment to the latter hack could substitute pubs for parks to produce a radically different service -- if both sets of geolocated data had been inserted into the same database.

There are already several systems out there which could potentially support this, such as freebase. I am not an expert, but if they were willing to sandbox an area, and the BBC were to upload a lot of its data into it (because accessing a single database is significantly easier than trying to make two work together), the infrastructure could get done in short order.

Julian Todd.