Comments on: Opening up the BBC’s natural history archive

By: Tom Scott

Tom Scott — Wed, 09 Sep 2009 13:57:07 +0000

Phil – it should be fixed now.

By: Tom Scott

Tom Scott — Tue, 08 Sep 2009 21:15:00 +0000

Philip – sorry about that, we’ll get that fixed.

By: Philip Kendall

Philip Kendall — Tue, 08 Sep 2009 17:22:16 +0000

I’ve just spidered the new links and I think there may be one small problem: the /nature/species page is linking to /nature/species/Doria’s_Tree-Kangaroo rather than /nature/species/Doria’s_Tree-kangaroo (note case of “K”). The former page doesn’t have the Wikipedia article or “Elsewhere on the web” sections (and breaks my script as there’s no “Doria’s Tree-Kangaroo” article at Wikipedia :-) ). The /genus/Tree-kangaroo page has the correct link.

[ There's also no video available on either of the Doria pages. I'm not sure if that's intentional or not ]

By: Philip Kendall

Philip Kendall — Thu, 03 Sep 2009 08:43:50 +0000

This may be a good time for a request then :-)

At the moment, I’m not finding it completely trivial to link to bbc.co.uk: say I’ve got the key “Snow_Leopard”. I can’t determine solely from that key the URL to link to, as I’ve got to know that it’s a species (and also that species are found in the /species/ directory on bbc.co.uk). Would it be at all possible to create something like http://www.bbc.co.uk/nature/key/Snow_Leopard which would redirect to the correct page?

By: Tom Scott

Tom Scott — Wed, 02 Sep 2009 09:28:41 +0000

Philip – yes we have plans to add more categories – but we’re also working on a /animals (and /plants) page which will display all ranks for which we have content (i.e. you won’t need to spider /species /genus etc.)

By: The joy of webscale identifiers « Jon Udell

The joy of webscale identifiers « Jon Udell — Mon, 31 Aug 2009 16:55:26 +0000

[...] example: http://www.bbc.co.uk/nature/species/African_Bush_Elephant. The BBC’s Tom Scott explains: Over the last few months we’ve been plundering the NHU’s [Natural History Unit's] [...]

By: Philip Kendall

Philip Kendall — Sun, 30 Aug 2009 17:57:36 +0000

I’m not spidering the pages on a regular basis per se, but there’s a script on my laptop which I can run whenever to pick up any changes. Are you going to be adding any “categories” other than the 8 you listed above? (just as that requires a small amount of work at the Freebase end).

By: Tom Scott

Tom Scott — Fri, 28 Aug 2009 17:06:41 +0000

The apostroph bug is all fixed, everything should be working again as normal. Sorry about that.

By: spence

spence — Fri, 28 Aug 2009 15:00:18 +0000

great work tom, thanks from canada

By: Tom Scott

Tom Scott — Thu, 27 Aug 2009 14:34:29 +0000

Very nice – we’ve tracked down the encoding bug and the fix should be live tomorrow morning.

How are you keeping things up to date? Are you spidering those pages on a regular basis? If not FYI we’ve a bunch of new taxa going live next week.

And indeed I would like to link to Freebase. Backlog item created.