Introducing ADA: Automated Data Architecture

Radio & Music Interactive

Jo Kent

Some background• The British Broadcasting

Corporation (BBC) is the UK's public-service broadcaster.

• It is the world's oldest national broadcasting organisation and the largest broadcaster in the world.

• It produces news articles, television and radio programmes 24 hours a day.

• Somehow that content needs to be findable.

The BBC in 1997

Hand curated

links and

index pages

SportSubsections

Sections

Sport ontology

NewsSubsections

Sections

3 most recent related stories

News App

MusicDynamically populated sections

Wikipedia content

Access to our ontologies and objects

Our ontologies define the domains of our news, sport and

music pages

Our programmes archive offer

• Only brand specific, bespoke archives

• Expensive to create and maintain

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What about the rest of our programmes?

No existing bespoke hierarchy will work for all of the topics we cover

But do we really want a hierarchy anyway?

Just as we no longer use directories for the web, we need to look beyond hierarchies for programmes

Homophily and user experience

Homophily (i.e., love of the same) – people like things that represent their worldview.

The more links you present, the greater the trust in your links.1

1. Ilan Lobel and Evan Sadler. Preferences, Homophily, and Social Learning. In Operations Research, 2014

So where to find our rich set of links?

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• We used Wikipedia category information

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• Robust, crowd-verified and well maintained data

ADA • An average of 7 categories per concept

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• We began working with the In Our Time archive

• It provides a broad and varied range of topics to explore

Basic onward journeys Limited, manually curated categorisation

ADA In Our Time linked data beta

ADA • Feedback has been positive and constructive 

Just a quick look delighted me … I can find all sorts of stuff I never knew existed

The new beta categories database is SUPERB!! Congratulations to the programmer. Truly wonderful. Many, many thanks. Any chance applying it to other science-type podcasts ?

Really ingenious – like it a lot, suggests connections, stimulates interest

Thanks for arranging the categories of In Our Time. I would absolutely love TV programs to be this accessible. Not ones chosen by experts or highlights of, but all of whole series

arranged so that one can follow ones own interests.

This is a marvellous development!  Google can be rewarding, but your development plugs us into a more manageable field of knowledge – one that’s nevertheless wide ranging and high

quality. I love the joining-up.

IOT's beta site is simply the single best I've experienced. Now that I have experienced it, I don't want to use the current site's format.

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• A single subject input automatically generates a wide range of categories

• No need for producers to think about categories/genres

Subject input ADA service processing Categories generated Connections created

dbpedia.org/resource/Category:1815_birthsdbpedia.org/resource/Category:1852_deathsdbpedia.org/resource/Category:19th-century_English_mathematiciansdbpedia.org/resource/Category:19th-century_women_writersdbpedia.org/resource/Category:Ada_(programming_language)dbpedia.org/resource/Category:British_computer_scientistsdbpedia.org/resource/Category:British_countessesdbpedia.org/resource/Category:Byron_familydbpedia.org/resource/Category:Computer_designersdbpedia.org/resource/Category:Deaths_from_uterine_cancerdbpedia.org/resource/Category:English_computer_programmersdbpedia.org/resource/Category:English_computer_scientistsdbpedia.org/resource/Category:English_people_of_Scottish_descentdbpedia.org/resource/Category:English_scientistsdbpedia.org/resource/Category:English_women_poetsdbpedia.org/resource/Category:Lord_Byrondbpedia.org/resource/Category:Programming_language_designersdbpedia.org/resource/Category:Women_computer_scientistsdbpedia.org/resource/Category:Women_in_engineeringdbpedia.org/resource/Category:Women_in_technologydbpedia.org/resource/Category:Women_mathematiciansdbpedia.org/resource/Category:Women_of_the_Victorian_era

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Maintaining link quality

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Roll out across programmes on the BBC website from September

ADAQuestions?