The Application of Weblike Design to Data:
Designing Data for Reuse
Matt Biddulph
The problem
How do you represent on the internet all the TV and radio programmes that the BBC broadcasts?
A page for every programme, linked together to reflect the connections between them.
Every episode uniquely identifiable and addressable, forever!
BBC Programmes
kr7rm
BBC Programmes
bbc.co.uk/radio3/morningon3/pip/kr7rm/
BBC Programmes
Web space design and URLs
The Design Process
How we worked:
- Pick out the first-class things
- Give them each one URL
- Define the relationships between them
- Link the instances together
- Subordinate information goes in the documents
- Make lists and summaries
- Put it all on the internet
URL Design
Good URLs should be:
- human-readable!
- suggestive!
- hackable!
- opaque!
- permanent!
- canonical!
- universal! resource! identifers!
http://del.icio.us/tag/xtech
http://talkeuro.com/uk/iii_iii_v_1/article_iii278
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/4536417.stm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BBC_Radio_3
http://bbc.co.uk/radio3/morningon3/pip/kr7rm/
These are a few of my favourite URLs
http://del.icio.us/tag/xtech
http://talkeuro.com/uk/iii_iii_v_1/article_iii278
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/4536417.stm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BBC_Radio_3
http://bbc.co.uk/radio3/morningon3/pip/kr7rm/
Identifiers! Identifiers! Identifiers!
Identifiers!
"It's like there are two views of the world - the solid one around us and the Matrix-style flowing green lines one. In this second world, until you give a thing a name - until you can point at it in greenspace - it simply doesn't exist."
-- Tom Coates, "The Age of Point-at-Things"
From web design to data design
From web design to data design
- Writing semantic markup (transition to XML)
- Providing Web services (moving away from place)
- Remixing content (about when and what, not who or why)
- Emergent navigation and relevance (users are in control)
- Adding metadata over time (communities building social information)
- Shift to programming (separation of structure and style)
-- "Web 2.0 for Designers" by Richard MacManus & Joshua Porter
How do we make a webservice?
- put data on the web
- ?
- profit!
The Design Process
Slight return:
- Pick out the first-class things
- Give them each one URL
- Define the relationships between them
- Link the instances together
- Subordinate information goes in the documents
- Make lists and summaries
- Put it on the internet
Web-friendly properties of the model
- Resource-centric
- Data model designed with navigation and presentation always in mind
- Explicit goal to be search-engine friendly
Extra sugar:
- convenience summaries and other second-order documents
- queries and searches
- writeable is hard!
Formats and uses for open data
Where does reuse happen?
- reference
- aggregation
- other people's web sites
- annotation
- on the commandline
- in the browser
- on the desktop
Formats
If your data's in the right shape, what's the right container?
- Semantic HTML
- RSS
- Microformats and XML Little Languages
- RDF
- CSV, Word docs, Graphics
- Whatever works for you and your users
Why open our data for reuse?
BBC Backstage
"The BBC will support social innovation by encouraging users' efforts to build sites and projects that meet their needs and those of their communities. [...] Backstage, a public site for the BBC's in-house development teams to share development plans with their peers and audiences. [...] The BBC will also be committed to using open standards that will enable users to find and repurpose BBC content in more flexible ways."
http://backstage.bbc.co.uk
What gets in the way?
issues facing open data
- contracts
- "no by default"
- rights and licenses - and your right to transfer them
- privacy
- authority
Thank you
matt.biddulph@bbc.co.uk