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Here in the Distribution Technologies team for ´óÏó´«Ã½ A&M Interactive, we look at how best to distribute media and metadata across A&M for current and future platforms; we also look at how to syndicate our content to external partnerships and the public.

Feeds are a great way of reusing content more easily in an automated way. You're probably familiar with the example of RSS feeds from blogs or podcasts, which save you having to visit different sites to collect the information you want. In A&M we reuse and reversion many different feed formats, not just RSS, to save us duplicating work across different platforms.

Feeds Hub is one of our new projects focusing on registering, reusing and reversioning data feeds.

It is an open-source project that aims to share its solutions publicly. ´óÏó´«Ã½ Audio & Music Interactive will be working with our FM&T colleagues, an independent development company called LShift, and the wider Open Source community to create this new technology.

In order to deliver Feeds Hub we'll not only be calling on our FM&T colleagues and an independent development company called LShift, but we also aim to engage the wider Open Source community and make this an Open Source project; this means we'll not just be helping the ´óÏó´«Ã½ make sense of using Feeds, but helping others with the same problem. In a world where we talk about sharing technology, and giving back to our audience, this seems the most sensible way to approach the project.

However, creating content in this way is usually just the beginning of the process.

Often when you find content you want to use, it's not quite the way you want it, so you spend time processing it yourself for your own project's needs. For example, A&M might want to reuse a web article for mobile, but simply publish a feed of the headline and the first paragraph and provide a link to the full story. We also might want to attach a smaller, low resolution image to the story or attach some metadata to make the story work on mobile. On digital television we might want to reproduce the story with a different set of reversioning rules for that feed. Another part of the ´óÏó´«Ã½ might want to take the same story and again apply a completely different set of rules to suit a service they are building. Then someone else comes along, sees your project producing a nice feed and takes it and processes it again in different way for their own needs.

Chaos reigns when something breaks at the start of the chain - maybe the original web story feed is turned off because no one knows it is being used by anyone else or the original feed is tweaked to add some extra information in the metadata. Downstream, systems that have been built on top of it now break and it is not always clear to those that need to fix them where the original source data has come from.

The number of new projects across the ´óÏó´«Ã½ starting to use feeds in creative ways is growing very quickly - just think of spaghetti... on a massive scale.

So what do we do? What are the options?

We could go down the route of gathering together a centralised 'Feed Usage' committee with members across the ´óÏó´«Ã½, to 'federate' feeds so that they are all produced in the same way but, in practice, this never truly works and is likely to stifle creativity. Often it is quite difficult to convince people to work together when they have already experienced the freedom of doing what they want - often they are concerned that their projects will be delayed. Not all feeds sources that we use or want to use are under our control, things like Twitter, Flickr, blogs, etc. Federation will never solve all our problems anyway - for example, it can't help when a source feed is turned off, it doesn't monitor failures.

We think there's another option that will be much more effective - Feeds Hub. We've been working on it for some time, and it's currently at the implementation stage.

Some of the more high level requirements we aim to solve with Feeds Hub include giving data source owners who register feeds proper usage statistics on how and where their data is used and how effective the feed is (stats on click-throughs). This allows them to take a call on whether the feed should continue to exist. By logging the hierarchy of feed usage and reuse, the system will enable data source owners to contact people that have registered their interest in using their feed - the 'feed consumers' - which will be useful for when source owners wish to pull data feeds or alert consumers to changes in the feed that might impact their systems. Consumers and Feed Managers (those that register or create feeds) alike can subscribe to monitoring alerts about when things break, as they inevitably will, allowing them to take action - perhaps in an automated way. We also want to give people the ability to view feed history so they can check if it is editorially appropriate for their project, how it has changed over time and how stable it has been to date. There will be a basic interface for transforming data so that you won't need to be a software engineer who understand complex code to edit or create new feeds. The advantages of this will be widespread - from supporting our publicly available websites, to our backend broadcast chains.

Feeds Hub is underway, we're currently trying to pull all these features in to the plan - we hope to be able to update you on the project through a number of sources in the coming months - via the RadioLabs blog, ´óÏó´«Ã½ Backstage and also through the communities around RabbitMQ and some other open source groups.

We're excited, I hope you are too.

Alan Ogilvie, Jacqueline Phillimore - Distribution Technologies, Audio & Music Interactive.

Last week Patrick and Nick were at the where they presented their work on ´óÏó´«Ã½ Music at the Developers track. The talk was entitled "Using the Web as our Content Management System on the ´óÏó´«Ã½ Music Beta".

"In this paper, we describe the ´óÏó´«Ã½ Music Beta, providing a comprehensive guide to music content across the ´óÏó´«Ã½. We publish a persistent web identifier for each resource in our music domain, which serves as an aggregation point for all information about it. We describe a promising approach in building web sites, by re-using structured data available elsewhere on the Web --- the Web becomes our Content Management System. We therefore ensure that the ´óÏó´«Ã½ Music Beta is a truly Semantic Web site, re-using data from a variety of places and publishing its data in a variety of formats."

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This is just a quick invite that might interest you. You might remember that last Autumn Radio Labs featured a series of posts from academics about fan studies and radio listeners. Next Monday the ´óÏó´«Ã½ and the AHRC are hosting an event showcasing all the projects in the scheme that sponsored this project, covering communities, learning journeys, accessibility, fan behaviour, user generated content and virtual worlds. There are still a few (free) tickets left to this event so head over to the Knowledge Exchange blog to find out more if you're interested.

Two weeks ago, we released the new version of ´óÏó´«Ã½ Programmes. This release includes many changes, supporting among other things the new Radio 4 and Radio 2 web sites. These two websites now use ´óÏó´«Ã½ Programmes as a platform. The navigation and user experience aspects have been mentioned across different places, but we thought we'd give more details about the new ´óÏó´«Ã½ Programmes features, along with some insights about developer-friendly aspects of the site.

The general philosophy behind ´óÏó´«Ã½ Programmes is that our web site is our API. In order to achieve that goal, we follow the principles. For each thing within our domain, we provide several representations. For example, we provide standard web pages, geared towards human navigation. We also provide representations, geared towards machine-processability. ´óÏó´«Ã½ Programmes then enables further applications to be built on top of our data, as e.g. by does.

Brands and series pages

One of the biggest feature of the new ´óÏó´«Ã½ Programmes website is the addition of pages for brands and series, e.g. the Today programme or the third series of Heroes. These pages hold information about the brand or series itself, along with information about episodes that are available to listen or watch, and broadcasts that are coming up.

Programmatic access to brand or series information can be done using the corresponding RDF representations. For example, we expose RDF for the Today programme, and RDF for the third series of Heroes. This RDF holds links to further resources, like episodes within the brand or series, which will lead you to broadcasts of these episodes.

Clickable tracklists

Episode pages now hold tracklisting information. For example, this episode of Sarah Kennedy holds information about tracks played during that episode. The tracklisting information holds links to the corresponding artists, when they are available in ´óÏó´«Ã½ Music. More information about the artists played can then be gathered from ´óÏó´«Ã½ Music, including other ´óÏó´«Ã½ shows on which the artist has been broadcasted, line-up information, news, related links or albums' reviews. We are working on exposing RDF for those tracklists, which should be available soon.

Tags on episodes

Episodes now have tags associated with them. For example, that episode of the Today programme is associated with multiple tags. Our tags are clustered in three categories: people, places and subjects. Tags are automatically extracted from the long synopsis of a programme and editorially moderated within our content management system, the Programme Information Tool.

Again, programmatic access to this information can be achieved by using the RDF representation of those episodes. For example, the RDF for that episode of the Today programme includes statements linking the episode to the different tags associated with it.

Category pages

All our genres, formats and tags are modeled as categories --- buckets in which we put programmes. All these categories also have a page. For example, the music genre page holds information about available episodes in that genre, broadcasts that are coming up, and podcasts associated with that genre. It also holds a list of podcasts, and a set of filters that can be used to restrict the view to a sub-genre (e.g. Country) or a specific service (e.g. SciFi dramas on ´óÏó´«Ã½ Radio 7). All these categories also have machine-readable information, e.g. this RDF for Birmingham, which also includes coordinates. This enables small mashups with no code involved, using an RDF browser such as MIT's , e.g. to plot available episodes on a map.

Further releases will provide tighter integration with , providing links from categories to corresponding DBpedia resources. Such links enables further contextualisation of programmes, as DBpedia provides lots of general knowledge about these categories. For example, it would allow you to filter programmes by the birth place of the people involved in them, to discover relationships between programmes ("this programme features an interview of this artist, who used to play with that other artist, who is featured in that other programme"), etc. More details about the integration of DBpedia within ´óÏó´«Ã½ Programmes is given in we wrote for the .

We also provide pages for category types, i.e. genres, formats, subjects, people and places. Machine-readable representations of those categories are also available. For example, the genres RDF holds the genre hierarchy we use, designed using the .

Schedules per category are also available, e.g. for "homes and gardens" factual programmes.

New release of the Programmes ontology

As our RDF representations gets richer and richer, we released a new version of our Programmes ontology, which handles the categories mentioned earlier, credits and temporal segmentation of programmes. We are also improving our modeling of services and channels, so that we can provide machine-readable information about where and how to access ´óÏó´«Ã½ services. We are still working on our feeds to make as much of our information available, and as as possible, but if you have any specific request, please contact us!