Using their World Cup site as an example, the BBC have posted an article explaining how they used, and intend to develop, linked data and semantic technologies to better present and share data.
John O’Donovan who is chief technical architect at BBC Future, explained how such technologies more effectively aggregate data on information-rich topics, such as the World Cup, which he says has more index pages than the entire rest of the BBC Sport site.
Another way to think about all this is that we are not publishing pages, but publishing content as assets which are then organised by the metadata dynamically into pages, but could be reorganised into any format we want much more easily than it could before.
The principles behind this are the ones at the foundation of the next phase of the internet, sometimes called the Semantic Web, sometimes called Web 3.0. The goal is to be able to more easily and accurately aggregate content, find it and share it across many sources. From these simple relationships and building blocks you can dynamically build up incredibly rich sites and navigation on any platform.
He identified the process as a shift from simply publishing stories and index pages, to publishing the content with intelligent tagging, saving time and improving accuracy.
He adds that it also enables the site to “accurately share this content and link out to other sites”, which was illustrated by a recent paidContent report where the BBC was rated number five for directing traffic to UK newspaper websites.