Storylines,Topics & Tags

An explanationof the BBC News Data Model

for the News Archive

(January 2014 : Belfast & London)Powered by BBC Connected StudioPowered by BBC Connected Studio

Jeremy Tarling: Senior Data Architect, BBC News.@JeremyTarling

Matt Shearer: Innovation Manager, BBC News Labs.@Completedespair

@BBC_News_Labs

linked data taggingthe audience can find and follow content relevant to them.topic tag: a person, organisation, place or theme.storyline tag: a storyline, or its component events.

why do it this way?it powers serendipity.

we organise by the “things” people want.

and connect with meaningful links.

contextStoryline is an open model.

BBC are now tagging new content.

the archive is not tagged yet.

topics - people

a Person can have properties like ‘birth-place’, ‘birth-date’, and roles like ‘President of Syria’ or ‘interpreter’

Thamsanqa JantjieNick RobinsonLara Clarke

Bashar al-Assad

topics - organisations

an Organisation can have properties like ‘address’, ‘website’, and can be notably associated with a person, place or theme

topics - places

Places can have a latitudes/longitudes and parent features (an administrative district or country for example)

topics - themes

Themes are the intangible things that we might want to classify our content by: ‘smoking’, ‘unemployment’, ‘health’

healthunemployment

smoking

storylinesstorylines are a way to link up and present content to the audience as a narrativestorylines are a special sort of linked data tag for annotating and aggregating contentstorylines can be tagged with topics

an example storyline

linking up storylines

linking up events

tag content with topics

tag content with storylines

tag storylines with topics…

so topics can connect storylines

before we finishwe can’t tag everything manually.

we can autotag topics,

and fingerprint into Storylines.

over to youorganise news content by storylineslink storylines together with topics relate archive storylines to current newssurface unexpected connected stories: “Death of Mandela” “Mandela’s life sentence” “Thatcher’s foreign policy” “Falklands War” …

Thanks@BBC_News_Labs

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