At the end of last year, Guardian Datablog and Datastore editor Simon Rogers and I appeared on a panel talking about linked data and the semantic web at the news:rewired conference in London. The BBC College of Journalism recorded the day’s sessions.
Here is Simon Rogers talking about some of the challenges the Datablog has with the formats that data is released in, and demonstrating some of the interactive visualisations that the Guardian has made with data about the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan released by Wikileaks.
In my talk, I looked at how we enable people to query our content using ISBNs and MusicBrianz IDs via the Open Platform API, and talked about some of the difficulties we have cross-referencing data, for example in the COINS database, when it isn’t all linked and open. I also talked about how the URL structure of legislation.gov.uk might give some pointers to how news organisations could do timelines and versioning online in the future, and outlined how the widespread adoption of linked data might enable journalists to carry out sophisticated queries to get results that currently take hours and hours of painstaking research time.
You can also view videos by the other two speakers who were on this panel – Martin Moore of the Media Standards Trust, and Silver Oliver of the BBC.
The BBC College of Journalism YouTube channel has a whole selection of other videos from the day, including Philip Trippenbach on why journalists shouldn’t necessarily only concentrate on stories anymore, Mary Beth Christie of FT.com on paywalls, and Joanna Geary of Times Online on valuing and deepening the relationship with the fans of your news brand.