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Year 2011

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Our development manifesto

Jul 30, 11 10:18 PM

Manifesto’s are quite popular in the tech community — obviously there’s the agile manifesto and I’ve written before about the kaizen manifesto and then there’s the Manifesto for Software Craftsmanship. They all try to put forward a way of working, a way of raising professionalism and a way of improving the quality of what you do and build.

If at first you don't succeed - call an airstrike.

Banksy by rocor, some rights reserved.

Anyway when we started work on on the BBC’s Nature site we set out our development manifesto. I thought you might be interested in it:

  1. Peristence — only mint a new URIs if one doesn’t already exist: once minted, never delete it
  2. Linked open data — data and documents describe the real world; things in the real world are identified via HTTP URIs; links describe how those things are related to each other.
  3. The website is the API
  4. RESTful — the Web is stateless, work with this architecture, not against it.
  5. One Web – one canonical URI for each resource (thing), dereferenced to the appropriate representation (HTML, JSON, RDF, etc.).
  6. Fix the data don’t hack the code
  7. Books have pages, the web has links
  8. Do it right or don’t do it at all — don’t hack in quick fixes or ‘tactical solutions’ they are bad for users and bad for the code.
  9. Release early, release often — small, incremental changes are easy to test and proof.

It’s worth noting that we didn’t always live up to these standards — but at least when we broke our rules we did so knowingly and had a chance of fixing them at a later date.

Comments (1)

What I wish I had made at bbc.co.uk if I stayed

Jun 3, 11 3:20 PM

In many ways I’ve been very lucky at the BBC I’ve helped make some cool stuff – well stuff I’m proud of. But since I’ve decided to leave I’ve started to wonder what else I would have like to have made, if I had stayed at the BBC.

There’s a bit of a health warning however, these are just ideas. I’ve no real idea if they are that practical and they almost certainly don’t fit into the current strategy.

Get Excited and make things

Get Excited and make things

My ideas…

Lab UK meets so you want to be a scientist

Lab UK is the part of the BBC’s website where you can participate in scientific experiments. They’ve done some cool stuff – including Brain Test Britain which had 67,000 people sign up and resulted in a paper in Nature [pdf].

The various experiments are tied into TV programmes and this is really important because it helps generate interest and get the number of participants required to make the experiment work. However, it also means that the experiments are designed in advance, by the scientists, and the public’s role is one of test subject.

The experiments do help build knowledge but they probably don’t help people understand science.

So here’s the idea – a bit like Radio 4′s “So You Want To Be A Scientist” the process would start with people suggesting ideas, questions they would like answering, the site would need to provide sufficient support to help people refine their ideas. It might even use material from the BBC archive to help explain some of the basics but at it’s heart it would be a collaborative process.

The ideas would then be voted on and the most popular would then be taken forward. With the help of scientists the experiment would be designed and build and carried out on the Lab UK platform, giving these amateur experiments potential access to a huge audience.

The process would be a rolling series of experiments designed and carried out by the public.

History through the eyes of the BBC

The BBC makes a lot of programmes about history – but much more significantly it has been part of or at least recorded a lot of our more recent history.

So rather than making a history site about the Romans, the Victorians or whatever I would use the BBC archive to tell the history of the world as seen through the eyes of the BBC.

Combining news stories, clips from programmes (broadcast or not), music and photographs the site would tell the story of the world since 18 October 1922.

The site would chart the major political, scientific, sporting, cultural and technological events since 1922 but also the minor events – the ones that remind us of our own past.

The site would provide a page for every day, month, year and decade since the BBC came into existence as well as pages for the people, organisations and events the BBC has featured in that time.

Basically a URI for everything the BBC has recorded in the last 90 odd years.

The site would also allow members of the public to add their thoughts and memories (shared under whatever licensing terms they wish) to enrich it further to create a digital public space for the UK.

Leave a Comment

Some thoughts on rNews

Jun 2, 11 12:12 PM

IPTC are working an ontology known as rNews which aims to standardise (and encourage the adoption of) RDFa in news articles.

This is a very, very good idea – it should allow for better content discovery, new ways to aggregate news stories about people, places or subjects and generally allow computers to help people process some of the structured information behind a story.

Newspaper by Luc De Leeuw

rNews is still in draft. At the time of writing the published spec is at version 0.1, there are clearly ambitions to built out on this work and it will be interesting to see where it goes.

Although I’m sure much of this has been thought about before I thought I would jot down my initial thoughts on this early draft.

More URIs please

The current spec makes extensive use of xsd:string and xsd:double to assign attributes to a class. For example, the Location Class includes attributes for longitude, latitude and altitude but no URIs for places.

Using URIs to name places (and people, subjects, organisations etc.) would allow for much more interesting things to be done with the data.

It would make it easier to aggregate content from more than one news outlet and generally link things together by location, person and area of interest.

There’s obviously an issue here – there needs to be a good source of URI for places – but in reality there are lots of candidates out there from dbpedia to geonames.

Greater reuse of existing vocabularies

There are existing vocabularies that describe the some of the classes described in rNew – notably FOAF and Dublin Core.

I would prefer rNews reusing those vocabularies or at least linking (owl:sameAS) to them.

I’m not a fan of tags

I don’t really like “tagging” it lack semantics and is extremely ambiguous.

If I tag a news story am I claiming it’s primarily about that thing, features that thing, also about that thing, what? And whatever you think it means I guarantee I can find someone else who disagrees!

I would rather see more defined predicates such as primarilyAbout etc. I recognise this would add a bit of complexity but it would also increase the utility of the vocabulary.

If the intention is to aid discoverability through categorisation then use SKOS.

Explicit predicates for source materials

I think it’s really important to explicitly link to source material, especially for science and medicine (it’s why Nature News and has always done so).

A simple set of predicates for the DOI, abstract URI, scientist/researcher of the original research and/or a URI for the raw data should suffice.

Again, it would also help if there was a handy source of URIs for scientists.

Should the story be at the heart of the ontology?

I’ve always thought of news stories as metadata about real world events.

If you reframe the problem in this way then what you really want are predicates to describe the relationship of the story (article, photo, video) to the event. You also then want links between people & places and those events (which could be inferred through the various news stories).

Building the ontology this way round would allow for some very powerful analysis and discovery of stories.

Anyway – I’ll be really interested to see how the ontology develops and how widely it gets adopted.

Comments (9)
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