Derek du Preez of Computer World reports, “The Financial Times (FT) has appointed John O’Donovan as its new Chief Technology Officer, who will lead the FT’s technology strategy across development and operations teams. O’Donovan joins the publication from the Press Association, where he was director of architecture and development, and has also previously worked as the chief architect for BBC News, Sport and Weather. Whilst at the BBC, O’Donovan played a key role in building some of the company’s flagship products, such as the BBC iPlayer, as well as the widely used sport APIs for the Olympics Data Feed.”

He continues, “The FT said that O’Donovan has ‘delivered influential technical strategies that have become widely adopted, using semantic technologies and architectural patterns for dealing with complex integration in modern technical environments.’ Read more

Oli Bartlett of the BBC recently discussed the latest uses of linked data at the BBC. He writes, “The Linked Data Platform is one of the legacies of the BBC Sport 2012 Olympics website. You may have read my blog post on the work we did for the Olympic Data Service. One aspect of the service delivered the semantic framework for the 10,000 athlete pages and a page per event, discipline, country and venue. This framework provides the semantic graph of data (the linked data containing the athletes, events and venues and their associations with each other) and the APIs on this data. It was all built on the Dynamic Semantic Publishing (DSP) platform which facilitates the publication of automated metadata driven web pages and had originally been developed for the football World Cup in 2010.” Read more

In a recent interview with the BBC, Sir Tim Berners-Lee described what he believes will be the dynamic future of the web. The article states, “Sir Tim Berners Lee, the man credited with inventing the world wide web, has said that he sees the internet becoming more dynamic with web pages able to do “more amazing things” as technology advances. He spoke to the BBC’s Jon Sopel from Davos, Switzerland, where political and business leaders have gathered for the World Economic Forum.” Read more

Matt Shearer of the BBC recently reported that the BBC’s News Lab team will begin exploring linked data technologies. He writes, “Hi I’m Matt Shearer, delivery manager for Future Media News. I manage the delivery of the News Product and I also lead on BBC News Labs. BBC News Labs is an innovation project which was started during 2012 to help us harness the BBC’s wider expertise to explore future opportunities. Generally speaking BBC News believes in allowing creative technologists to innovate and influence the direction of the News product. For example the delivery of BBC News’ responsive design mobile service started in 2011 when we made space for a multidiscipline project to explore responsive design opportunities for BBC News. With this in mind the BBC News team setup News Labs to explore linked data technologies.” Read more

The BBC has posted a new video discussing the Internet’s next frontier, particularly the Internet of Things. According to the description of the video, “In its early days the internet was seen simply as a way of transferring data across large distances but it is now playing an ever increasing part in our lives. David Reid reports on what is seen as the next big frontier for the web – called the internet of things – allowing you to use your smartphone to control your home heating, pay for parking and even monitor your own fitness.” Read more

The winner of the Semantic Web Challenge at November’s International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC) was EventMedia Live, a web-based environment that exploits real-time connections to event and media sources to deliver rich content describing events that are associated with media, and interlinked with the Linked Data cloud.

This week, it will begin a one-year effort under a European Commission-funded project to align its work with the Nokia Maps database of places, so that mobile users of the app can quickly get pictures of these venues that were taken by users with EventMedia’s help.

A project of EURECOM, a consortium combining seven European universities and nine international industrial partners, EventMedia Live has its origins in the “mismatch between those sites specializing in announcing upcoming events and those other sites where users share photos, videos and document those events,” explains Raphaël Troncy, assistant professor at the EURECOM: School of Engineering & Research Center, Multimedia Communications, and one of the project’s leaders.

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Lee Feigenbaum of Cambridge Semantics recently interviewed (on CMS Wire) the BBC regarding the company’s adoption of semantic web technologies. Feigenbaum writes, “The BBC’s website for the 2010 World Cup was notable for the raw amount of rich information that it contained. Every player on every team in every group had their own web page, and the ease with which you could navigate from one piece of content to the next was remarkable. Within the Semantic Web community, the website was notable for one more reason: it was made possible by the BBC’s embrace of Semantic Web technologies.” Read more

Jamie Beach recently interviewed Marina Kalkanis, Head of Media Services at the BBC regarding the BBC’s online coverage of the Olympics. Kalkanis stated, “For the UK audience the 2012 Olympics online offering changed the way our audience engage with digital media. We shattered previous records for consumption across desktops, mobiles, tablets and TVs. We found that TV and mobile usage grew by orders of magnitude and we’ve seen sustained growth afterwards. With 24 live streams and 2500 hours of VOD available across all these devices, our challenge was to ensure that audiences could find the events they wanted to watch. With the Olympics we introduced the Interactive Video Player (IVP) with the chapter markings and event switching.” Read more

Dirk Willem van Gulik, Chief Technical Architect of the BBC recently discussed the company’s multiple uses of the BBC’s archive. He writes, “It is an enormous collection of building blocks for creativity , and it has been used for many years by programme makers inside and outside the BBC to provide inspiration and material. For some time now I’ve been part of the team driving a move to digital storage and distribution for the archive, and I can see clearly that this creates entirely new opportunities for making the BBC’s history more widely available – where we have the rights to do so – as well as new ways to use it for public benefit.” Read more

Libby Miller and Chris Newell of the BBC recently introduced the ViSTA-TV project. They write, “ViSTA-TV (Video Stream Analytics for Viewers in the TV Industry) is a two-year collaborative research project about linked open data, statistics and recommendations for live TV, involving online TV viewing data, programme metadata and other external sources of data. We are working with three research institutions (University of Zurich, TU Dortmund University, and the VU University Amsterdam) and two companies (Zattoo and Rapid-I) to create: (1) Real-time TV recommendations for viewers. (2) Highly accurate low-latency audience research. (3) A high-quality, linked open dataset about TV. (4) A marketplace for audience metrics.” Read more