- Increased efficiency in content creation and curation
- Cut costs on expensive editorial management of content assets
- Improved user experience by providing user-centring navigation
- New revenue stream added thanks to increased content aggregation, re-use and re-purposing
The Goal
BBC Future Media had been tasked with finding a solution for transforming the BBC’s static content management and publishing framework to a fully dynamic semantic architecture. By using ontologies and an enterprise-ready knowledge base with the power of inference, the broadcaster wanted to minimize the expensive editorial management of content assets. They also wanted to have a website navigation guided by what was important to the consumer (for example, teams, countries, players, and so on). As a result, the BBC expected to see an increase in content aggregation, reuse, and re-purposing without additional costs.
The Challenge
With 32 teams, 8 groups, and 776 individual players, managing the website for the 2010 FIFA World Cup was a daunting task. There were simply too many pages and too few journalists to create and keep up with the site’s coverage of the event. The BBC needed a way to quickly and accurately generate large volumes of timely content about the matches, groups, teams, and players without relying on the costly manual intervention of editorial staff.
The Solution: a Dynamic Semantic Publishing Framework
The Dynamic Semantic Publishing (DSP) architecture developed for the BBC’s 2010 World Cup website curates and publishes HTML and RDF aggregations based on embedded Linked Data identifiers, ontologies, and associated inference.
RDF semantics improves content reuse, search engine rankings, the levels of automation determined by the journalists (“edited by exception”), and support for semantic advertisement placement for audiences outside of the UK. The DSP approach also facilitates multi-dimensional entry points and richer navigation, greatly improving user experience and engagement.
All this is delivered by Ontotext GraphDB – a leading RDF for knowledge graphs.
Business Benefits
- 800+ Dynamic aggregations/pages (Player, Team, Group, etc.), generated through SPARQL queries
- Average unique page requests/day: 2 million
- Average SPARQL queries/day: 1 million
- 100s repository updates/inserts per minute with OWL 2 RL reasoning
- Multi data center fully resilient, clustered 6 node triplestore
Why Choose Ontotext?
The real proof that our technology works and makes a difference is the BBC’s World Cup 2010 Website – the first project running on the BBC’s Dynamic Semantic Publishing architecture and it was regarded very successful by both the BBC and website visitors. With the DSP Framework, the BBC achieved the desired efficiencies in content creation and curation. Consequently, they announced that the framework would be expanded to the rest of the BBC Sports section, including their coverage of the 2012 Olympics.
Continuing Success: Linked Data Platform
Since the initial success of the FIFA World Cup site, the BBC has committed to creating the BBC’s Linked Data Platform – a next-generation tool for dynamic semantic content. This is not a trivial feat for an organization of £5 billion in revenue and 23,000 employees. However, the BBC has recognized the significant strategic advantage of delivering content more intelligently and in greater detail than possible at the time. To that end, Ontotext technology has enabled the public service broadcaster to reuse content across divisions and make it more visible while reducing production costs.