New BBC Sports Website Makes Heavy Use of RDF

New submitter whyloginwhysubscribe writes "A technical blog post describes how the BBC has rolled out the latest changes to its sports website in anticipation of the Summer Olympics in London. The innovative content management system extends the already available dynamic semantic publishing, which enables their journalists 'to spend more time creating great content and less time managing that content.' The post covers some of the technical and lots of the HCI / UI design decisions and is accompanied by a non-technical overview of the re-design."

Comments

Reality distortion field?

[Ferzerp]

They had better be careful. Apple is a very lawsuit-happy corporation.

RDF?

[mpeskett]

Wish it was more common in writing to define an acronym before using it, especially one that doesn't appear in the article.

Re:RDF?

[TBedsaul]

Robotech Defense Force

Re:RDF?

[Nick Fel]

Never mind RDF. What's 'sport'?

I'll get a gold in freestyle grammar nazism

[Hognoxious]

BBC has rolled out the latest changes to it's sports website

Did they include an erroneous apostrophe detector?

Re:I'll get a gold in freestyle grammar nazism

[Menkhaf]

On a similar note, what's up with the 5196 empty lines?

~/tmp$ grep ^$ launching_bbc_sport_new.html |wc
      5196 0 5196

...or the 21360 kB of whitespace?

~/tmp$ grep '^[[:blank:]]*$' launching_bbc_sport_new.html |wc
      5896 1400 21360

That's one sixth of the page size (excluding external sources).

And speaking of external sources: 336 kB of Javascript. Neat, huh?

~/tmp/bbc$ for i in `grep --color=never -o 'src="http://[[:alnum:][:punct:]/]*"' launching_bbc_sport_new.html |sed -r 's/src="//' | sed -r 's/"//'|grep '.js' --color=never`; do wget $i; done;
~/tmp/bbc$ du -ch *.js*
28K bbccom.js
28K blq_core.js
16K comments-blog.js
8.0K embed.js
16K gloader.0.1.6.js
16K gloader.js
8.0K gw.js?csid=J08781
20K id-core.js
60K id.js
24K require.js
64K s_code.js
36K sharetools.js
12K swfobject.js
336K total

I haven't done any webpage project nearly as big as what I imagine BBC to be, but still, 476 kB all in all. Wow.

2012, year of the semantic web!

[Trepidity]

Unfortunately we have a bit of a backlog, and the year of the semantic web is current queued just behind the year of the linux desktop, so there may be a short delay.

The one acronym that seems to make sense

[Anonymous Coward]

Apparently they're talking about the Resource_Description_Framework.

Re:Ugh

[Elf Sternberg]

It depends upon how "active" you want it to be. RDF is mostly for the back-end anyway.

As a developer heavily involved in building RDF/RDFA utilities, I can't begin to express just how annoying it is to see a Slashdot header pointing to a "technical blog post" that has absolutely no mention of the technology used: nothing about the libraries or server platforms used; nothing about the trade-offs with client desktop vs mobile vs legacy (IE7 / FF3.x) vs. ARIA (accessibility). If you search through the article, you find a link to another article that says they use Silverlight (WTF!?) to handle their contentEditable stuff, Java as their RDFa store, and PHP as their deployment strategy. It looks like an overpriced, incoherent mess that's already headed for legacy status.

Semantic publishing

[ygslash]

The interesting part is behind a link buried deep inside this post. It's the dynamic semantic publishing engine, which was originally used on their World Cup 2010 site.

Re:Ugh

[jd]

The BBC was one of the first websites to actually survive the Slashdot Effect (and report having done so), an achievement worthy of an award at the time. Their tech guys also invented the Dirac format (which they have yet to use for anything). The BBC multicasts at least some of their channels and provides the iPlayer for VoD-ing programs later (pity they don't support PPV for out-of-country, but it's a start).

As such, I'd say their tech guys have defined "forward" for the next decade for everyone else. It's good to see them continuing to experiment as well as adapt to the new medium. Research and development has pretty much died - where it ever existed - amongst many of the major television stations. Given their financial situation, I'm actually very impressed that they're putting money into technical innovation.