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"BBC catalogue begins development"

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October 31, 2005

BBC catalogue begins development

Posted by bopuc at October 31, 2005 06:44 PM

Biddulph and Hammersley are on the case.

Screenshot 1 (Searching for "John Peel") and screenshot 2 ("John Peel's contributer page")

I think I would have dropped everything to play on this project too. Sigh. ;)

My favorite line in Biddulph's entry is:

"Nearly a million programmes are catalogued, with descriptions, contributor details and annotations drawn from a wonderfully detailed controlled vocabulary."

Ahhhh structured data.

And from Mr.Hammersley:

it’s all developed in Ruby on Rails, and has oodles of Ajax, and tags, and RDF, and FOAF, and Sparklines, and Microformats, and just about everything else we can fit in. If you’re a Semantic Web or Microformat bod who wants a particular feature, email me and I’ll see what I can do.

I am very pleased by these two entries, the fact that the BBC archive is happening aside; both guys mention traditionally defined as Semantic Web tech, like RDF and FOAF, alongside the young whippersnapper "Web 2.0" stuff like "AJAX" and... uh... what's the other... oh yeah Microformats. (heeeheheeee... I am gleeful to notice just now, no mention of "RSS" and "OPML"! Yay!!!) All done in the programming language Ruby, using one of it's web-app frameworks, Ruby on Rails. (I tried getting into 'rails but just couldn't grok the environment. "Hunh? Better to not use Apache? Hunh? I need to initialize an instance? Whaaa?" Oh well. Django, the Python equivalent seems much simpler...)

I digress... point is, I'm glad the dust is settling and we are seeing that it's all good and let's move forward just building cool stuff. Right? Right.

So, as Manuel would say: "Yes! You... Men! Work."

Comments

what's wrong with rss? just curious.

Posted by: hugh at October 31, 2005 08:41 PM

ahaha.

Posted by: karl at November 1, 2005 11:43 AM

Eeee, ok before we derail this thread... ;)
Hugh you busted me being my usual very vague. I was refering specifically to the hooplah some people have made over, specifically, RSS 2.0. Nothin more. "web content syndication", though a terrible misnomer, is "good stuff", for sure.

Posted by: Boris at November 1, 2005 03:11 PM