[LINK] Publishing BBC Metadata on the Web

[Tom Worthington]

Greetings from the opening of the Meta 2011 Conference at ANU University 
House in Canberra <http://www.metalounge.org/meta-2011-conference>.

Tom Scott, from the BBC is the first speaker, on Publishing BBC 
Metadata. Tom mentioned the Semantic Web in his first few words. He 
asked "What is the web?", showing Tim Berners-Lee's original paper 
"Information Management: A Proposal" ( CERN, March 1989) 
<http://www.w3.org/History/1989/proposal-msw.html>.

Tom demonstrated the BBC Nature website, which in addition to ordinary 
web pages, provides structured data, using RSS and RDF and semantic 
mark-up using microformats. This data is available for others to use and 
is also used by the BBC to create new stories: 
<http://www.bbc.co.uk/nature/feedsanddata>.

Tom also mentioned dbpedia, an attempt to structure Wikipedia data: 
<http://dbpedia.org/About>.

At this point he argued that there is no metadata and what is commonly 
though of is data is actually metadata. In a reference to Stephen 
Hawking, Tom said "Turtles all the way down": 
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turtles_all_the_way_down>.

This is an metaphor for infinite recursion, however, I would argue it is 
"metadata all the way down". James Gleick argues in his book "The 
Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood", that the ability to reason 
abstractly came after writing ("if all horses are white ..."): 
<http://blog.tomw.net.au/2011/05/james-gleick-on-information.html>.
That seems unlikely, as I am sure horse breeders reasoned on the nature 
of a good horse, before written language. Data and metadata are 
intertwined by their nature, not due to a human invention.

Tom argued that we needed to move from the document web to the data web, 
the web of things, which is what the semantic web is for. However, after 
spending many years trying to understand the semantic web and teach it 
to university students, I think this is a concept which needs to be 
further refined and simplified to be widely used. Tim Berners-Lee's key 
contribution with the World Wide Web was to take an existing complex 
electronic document standard (SGML) and simplify it to make something 
easy enough to use (HTML). Ever since, information professionals have 
argued that HTML is flawed, some tinkered with SGML and produced XML, 
others tinkered with HTML to make XHTML, but lost was the simpliccity of 
HTML. In my view the semantic web similarly needs simplification, even 
if the purists then say it is incomplete.

Tom then explained that the BBC use metadata for program guides. The 
importance is not the metadata but the information it describes. This is 
the key point which information professionals tend to find so obvious, 
that they forget to explain. While they may say metadata is data about 
data, but do not say why this is useful. That is a topic I will explore 
in my talk to the conference tomorrow, with Senator Lundy on "Designing 
for Democratic Dialogue: More then Mating iPads" ( 11.00 am on Thursday 
26th May, 2011).

Next on the program today we have Greg Stone, Chief Technology Officer, 
Microsoft Australia and Professor John McMillan, Australian Information 
Commissioner, who is launching the new government information policy: 
<http://blog.tomw.net.au/2011/04/designing-for-democratic-dialogue.html>.

More in my blog at: 
<http://blog.tomw.net.au/2011/05/publishing-bbc-metadata-on-web.html>.


-- 
Tom Worthington FACS CP HLM, TomW Communications Pty Ltd. t: 0419496150
PO Box 13, Belconnen ACT 2617, Australia  http://www.tomw.net.au
Adjunct Senior Lecturer, School of Computer Science, The
Australian National University http://cs.anu.edu.au/courses/COMP7310/
Visiting Scientist, CSIRO ICT Centre: http://bit.ly/csiro_ict_canberra