Mo McRoberts - Developer, BBC Archive Development @nevali
Digital Public Space at Over The Air 2011
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- Trying to make BBC Digital Archive accessible
- Then working together with other organisations:
- BFI, Kew, national maritime museum, royal opera house, british library, national archives, national library of scotland
- have 25–30 organisations who have said yes to accessing data
- but only have Mo to connect things!
- lots of separate catalogues
- each catalogue refers to things in asset stores
- may not be able to get to asset stores, but linking catalogues by itself is useful
- also link to external sources such as dbpedia, geonames, etc
- want to make the archives accessible to people other than archivists
- golden rule:
- give everything a single, permanent URI
- make the data about that thing accessible at that URI
- could try to fit everything into one giant, extensible XML schema
- or else just go with RDF…
- can put all the RDF from catalogues into an RDF Aggregator
- wanted to find overlaps in the catalogues
- aggregator evaluates all info coming in and tries to find matches
- not just exact matches, but close matches too
- disambiguating is the hard part
- create lots of stub objects
- people, places, events, things, …
- eventually want to have spindle in the hands of the public
- the archives themselves are slowly being digitised, but it takes quite a while
- BBC Redux captures and stores TV and radio, transcodes them and makes them available in various forms
- been running since July 2007 for everything that’s been running centrally (not all local opt-outs)
- now has an API and developers’ guide
- available to developers for the duration of OverTheAir:
- prototype RDF aggregator to query
- API to Redux
- references to Redux are not fully tested – may or may not work
- genome project:
- scan in, OCR and codify all of the Radio Times issues
- from 1920 to 2009
- this and /programmes will provide a public API for all broadcasts ever
- three windows of content availability:
- free to air on iPlayer
- commercially useful
- out of commercial time: e.g. desert island discs (but no music)
- aiming to have content available in 10 years’ time
- BBC Director General has committed to this
- 1 recent episode of Doctor Who has 80 rights clearances
- an older episode would be worse as you would have to find the appropriate rights holders
