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Financial Times Names ex-BBC Exec New CTO

Angela Guess — Fri, 10 May 2013 12:00:19 +0000

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.’ continued…

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Linked Data at the BBC: The Latest Advances

Angela Guess — Fri, 22 Feb 2013 15:55:51 +0000

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.” continued…

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Tim Berners-Lee Discusses Dynamic Capabilities of HTML5, Open Web Access

Angela Guess — Wed, 30 Jan 2013 16:00:55 +0000

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.” continued…

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BBC News Lab to Explore Linked Data Technology

Angela Guess — Wed, 30 Jan 2013 15:39:05 +0000

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.” continued…

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Video: The Internet of Things

Angela Guess — Tue, 08 Jan 2013 14:30:06 +0000

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.” continued…

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EventMedia Live, Winner of ISWC Semantic Web Challenge, Starts New Project With Nokia Maps, Extends Architecture Flexibility

Jennifer Zaino — Thu, 03 Jan 2013 12:01:04 +0000

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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Interview: Semantic Tech at the BBC

Angela Guess — Thu, 01 Nov 2012 18:00:43 +0000

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.” continued…

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BBC Online Olympic Coverage Shattered Records

Angela Guess — Mon, 17 Sep 2012 18:00:07 +0000

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.” continued…

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The BBC Archive: Making the Most of a Public Resource

Angela Guess — Tue, 28 Aug 2012 18:00:35 +0000

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.” continued…

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Introducing ViSTA-TV

Angela Guess — Mon, 27 Aug 2012 18:00:14 +0000

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.” continued…

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School Days: Reading, Writing, and Linked Data

Jennifer Zaino — Fri, 10 Aug 2012 10:02:03 +0000

Courtesy: Flickr/jjorogen

September’s getting closer, and for just about everyone, the coming turn of the calendar page brings to mind thoughts of the school year ahead. More specifically, for educators and students, the new school year is just as likely to call up images of iPad tablets and smart-boards as it is to bring forth memories of freshly sharpened pencils and blackboards.

But it’s still probably true that dreams of Linked Data don’t dance through their heads as they contemplate the curricula. But that will change, especially in higher education, where online and remote learning increasingly plays a role — and sooner rather than later. A paper published earlier this summer, Linked Data for Open and Distance Learning, provides some interesting perspective on the idea. Authored by Mathieu d’Aquin, Research Fellow, Knowledge Media Institute at The Open University, it explores how Linked Data can revolutionize the arena of open and distance learning.

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An Olympic Opportunity to Share Data

Paul Miller — Mon, 30 Jul 2012 13:00:40 +0000

Sir Tim Berners-Lee and the Web, featured during the 2012 Olympics Opening Ceremony

As you’ve probably noticed, the 2012 Olympics are underway in London right now. A massive logistical exercise and a global spectacle, the Games have also given the BBC another opportunity to impress with their semantic technology skills. And impress they most certainly do. Only, I can’t help feeling this was a missed opportunity for a bolder and more modern piece of data sharing, more in keeping with both the Olympics spirit and Sir Tim Berners-Lee’s tweet during his appearance at the Opening Ceremony; ‘this is for everyone.’ continued…

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The Semantic Link with Guest, Nick Holzherr of ‘The Apprentice’ and Whisk – July, 2012

Eric Franzon — Mon, 16 Jul 2012 14:30:15 +0000

On Friday, July 13, a group of Semantic thought leaders from around the globe met with their host and colleague, Paul Miller, for the latest installment of the Semantic Link, a monthly podcast covering the world of Semantic Technologies.

This episode includes a discussion with Nick Holzherr, finalist on the BBC One Television Series, “The Apprentice,” and founder of Whisk, a recipe planning idea based on big data and semantic analysis. He was named ‘emerging entrepreneur of the year’ by Insider Magazine in 2010, and Birmingham Young Personality of the Year (Entrepreneurship) in 2011.
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Highlights from SemTechBiz SF from Anthony Myers

Angela Guess — Mon, 11 Jun 2012 14:30:46 +0000

Anthony Myers of CMS Wire recently shared a few highlights from SemTechBiz SF. He writes, “Semantic Web technology is slowly changing the way people use the Internet, and SemTech 2012 is a prime showcase for the best minds in linked data, enterprise solutions and interactive Web experiences. That’s because semantic technology is approaching widestream adoption, and Google’s recent launch of the Knowledge Graph platform is one such manifestation of the technology’s mainstream appeal. At day three of the SemTech 2012 Conference in San Francisco, companies such as Google, Microsoft, NASA, the BBC and the New York Times gathered to present their visions on Web standards of the future. Specifically, many presenters focused on how they are using linked data to better locate, relate and translate content for the best possible Web experience.” continued…

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Under the Hood: A Closer Look at Information WorkBench

Kristen Milhollin — Thu, 31 May 2012 09:59:21 +0000

fluid Operations’ Information Workbench is part of the semantic infrastructure supporting the BBC’s revolutionary coverage of the 2012 Olympic Games. Below is a conversation with fluid Operations Senior Architect for Research & Development Michael Schmidt in advance of his 2012 Semantic Technology and Business Conference presentation. This conversation is a supplement to the series “Dynamic Semantic Publishing for Beginners.”

Q. Is the Information Workbench a response to the need for more robust applications to help process “Big Data”? How is it different than other popular tools?

A. Dealing with Big Data involves a number of different challenges, including increasing volume (amount of data), complexity (of schemas and structures), and variety (range of data types, sources).

However, most Big Data solutions available on the market today focus on volume only, in particular supporting vertical scalability (greater operating capacity, efficiency, and speed.) This means that such solutions mainly address the analysis of large volumes of similarly structured data sets. Yet the Big Data problem is not fully solved only by technologies that help you process similarly structured data more quickly and efficiently.

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