![\"\"](\"http:\/\/commonplatform.co.uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2008\/10\/bowbrick_bbc_pass1-300x216.jpg\" "\\"Steve")
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I think this is my fourth full day at the BBC. I’ve got a Staff Pass (temporary) and I’m just getting used to the idea that I’m allowed in the building at all. Here are my notes from a few interesting presentations and meetings I attended last week:<\/p>\n
Linked Open Music<\/strong>. First, Matthew Shorter<\/a> and Tom Scott<\/a> gave a short talk about \/music<\/a>, which is a big, strategically important effort to open up the BBC’s music assets and to get the BBC onto the Linked Open Data map<\/a> (and here’s a magisterial but slightly opaque talk by TBL about Linked Open Data<\/a>). The centrepiece of the project is the adoption of MusicBrainz<\/a>, a vast community-maintained structured database (real semantic web stuff) of music info which is published under various permissive licences (including CC<\/a>).<\/p>\n This is all good: the BBC doing the right thing in a very public way and lending authority and credibility to an open data project as they do so. \/music<\/a> is going to become an important destination for fans everywhere but also an important source of authoritative content. Tom showed a page from the Channel 4 web site which (legitimately) lifts BBC CC content – now there’s an intellectual challenge for the defenders of rights and brand values.<\/p>\n While we’re at it, I want it written into the record that during the presentation I suggested an iTunes plug-in for \/music<\/strong>. Wouldn’t it be cool if iTunes could wrap your music in all the rich metadata (historic context, artists’ biographies, pictures and archive etc. etc.) from \/music?<\/p>\n Enhancing news<\/strong>. Jonathan Austin and Kevin Hinde<\/a> presented two fascinating trial projects from BBC News Online. Muddy Boots<\/a> uses code developed by a company called Rattle<\/a> to embed floating links to Wikipedia entries in news stories. Apture<\/a> does something similar but also allows users to click on any word in the text for a definition. Both tools depend on journalists to select links so this is an editorial-driven innovation – also a controversial one, if the standards hardliners<\/a> are to be believed. Of course, any self-respecting social media web site would have had the audience (or an algorithm) providing the links but I guess that’s an option that’s really not available at BBC News.<\/p>\n Next generation video<\/strong>. I went along to a quite mind-expanding demonstration of next generation Ultra-High Definition video<\/a> not really knowing what to expect. Engineers from Kingswood Warren and the system’s Japanese inventors (NHK) were on hand and they were real old-school engineers – proper jacket-and-tie engineers. When the six metre screen in White City lit up with images of sunflowers, children dancing, snow-covered landscapes and so on, the resolution (which I understand is nearly ten times greater than current HD) was so immense, the experience so engulfing… I don’t want to gush but it was the kind of hyper-real sensory rush that leaves you crying without quite knowing why.<\/a><\/p>\n Kingswood Warren<\/a> had arranged the demonstration in part to show off their equally mind-blowing Dirac<\/a> open source compresson technology which took the Ultra-HD signal’s 28 Gigabits\/second and squished it down to 128 Megabits\/second with no noticeable loss of quality. Dirac is an example of what James Cridland calls ‘cooperating on technology, competing on content’: a real technological advance made available to the broadcast\/new media community at no charge and unencumbered by restrictive licences. It’s also a candidate for inclusion in a future version of HTML<\/a>.<\/p>\n Top secret!<\/strong> I’m going to be keeping most of my fascinating meeting with Madhav Chinnappa to myself, I’m afraid. He’s on attachment from BBC News as Head of Business Development for Journalism and he’s responsible for doing the kind of deal that gets BBC news content onto third party web sites and services. His primary concern is nudging the BBC’s online reach upwards to bring it into line with the numbers for TV and radio. A tall order, I’d say.<\/p>\n Anyway, although I’d love to be able to tell you what we talked about, Madhav’s involvement with gnarly issues like rights and commercial deals make that impossible for the time being. I don’t quite know how to reconcile my mission to open up the BBC with confidentiality issues like this but my judgment is that telling you who I’m meeting<\/em> but not what I’m talking about<\/em> is better than saying nothing at all<\/em>. What do you think?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I think this is my fourth full day at the BBC. I’ve got a Staff Pass (temporary) and I’m just getting used to the idea that I’m allowed in the building at all. Here are my notes from a few interesting presentations and meetings I attended last week: Linked Open Music. First, Matthew Shorter and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[4,8,20,17,16,18,19],"class_list":["post-24","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-bbc","tag-commonplatform","tag-creative-commons","tag-linked-data","tag-music","tag-openness","tag-semantic-web"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/commonplatform.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/commonplatform.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/commonplatform.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/commonplatform.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/commonplatform.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=24"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/commonplatform.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":29,"href":"https:\/\/commonplatform.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24\/revisions\/29"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/commonplatform.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=24"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/commonplatform.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=24"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/commonplatform.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=24"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}