Like everyone else, we have been wondering what set top boxes connected to the internet will look like for the user. What kind of interfaces will work best when TV and the web become bedfellows?
We decided to mock up a prototype application to play around with some user interface ideas.
The most useful application we could think of was something that would provide web content that was relevant to what was being talked about on TV.
So we created a Flash application that pulls in live subtitles from an IRC channel and places them underneath a live feed of News 24. Thanks very much to Andrew McParland and his team in R&D for making the subtitles available.
As the subtitles appear on the screen they are sent off to a natural language processing API and relevant concepts are extracted from the text (and in our case returned as DBpedia terms).
When the concepts come back from the API they are placed over the EMP on the left of the picture. We've mapped these terms to BBC News content and clicking on them reveals links on the right. Clicking on these opens up the web page in a new tab.
It needs a bit of work. Sometimes the concepts returned are a little random and it would be good to filter them. We also need to come up with a scalable way of using the subtitles. Both things are doable.
It would also be possible to tailor the application to link to specific parts of bbc.co.uk. At the moment we are just linking to News but it could be that we linked to GCSE Bitesize so that students could find Learning content that was relevant to stuff they were watching on TV.
With Google TV launching in the Autumn and Canvas next year expect to see more interfaces like this soon.
Screencast
This video shows the application working with a live stream from News 24
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Further information
If you would like more information about this prototype please contact andrew.littledale@bbc.co.uk. We hope to demo it at the The Media Festival Arts next month.
Please visit us at http://backstage.bbc.co.uk/data_art/
Thinking Digital 2010 was a blast... It was an excellent two days of insightful, informative, eclectic and mind-bending talks around digital or technology related subjects. It's one of the few conferences that I attend knowing I will do my best to attend most of the talks - as the quality of speakers is fantastic!
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Hi
This is just to let you know that unfortunately Ian Forrester, Senior Development Producer of BBC Backstage was taken ill last week and is now recuperating in Hope Hospital in Salford.
At the moment he is in a serious but stable condition and is being well cared for by the staff at Hope and his family.
For those who want to pass on their messages the Message for Ian Google form is here.[Edit 04/06/10] Now that Ian's family have set up the
Caring Bridge site we're recommending that people wanting to drop him a line use that channel instead.
Flowers aren't allowed in ICU, but cards are, and can be sent to:
Ian Forrester
c/o Intensive Care Unit
Salford Royal NHS Foundation Trust
Stott Avenue
Salford
M6 8HD
We will keep you updated when we hear anything more but until then we hope that you can have Ian in your thoughts and let his other close friends know.
Dr Adrian Woolard
[In Ian's hopefully short absence I'll be looking after this blog- Ant Miller]
When is a dataset not a dataset? How many of the now 3241 datasets listed as part of data.gov.uk are easy to open up and play with? How many are tables for computers to analyse, instead of PDF reports for people to read?
The Hacks and Hackers Hackday filled a Channel 4 office with journalists and developers on the final Friday in January. Our aim was to tell new stories with open data. Attendees already had form - the BBC's Open Secrets blogger Martin Rosenbaum, and data journalism teams from the Times, the Guardian, and the FT. Tom Loosemore judged our attempts in his role as head of hosts 4iP, alongside My Society boss Tom Steinberg. They awarded the prize to my team's analysis of Tory candidates. But another project promised to shed light on public data in the UK.
Tom Morris was part of a team that looked into the quality of data.gov.uk. Although data.gov.uk advertises itself as a database of open datasets, many of the entries are actually PDF files. He built a prototype format checker that invites people to go through datasets and record the file format. You can listen to him explaining the checker to me and to the hackday, or reuse the interview under the BBC Backstage License.
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On Wednesday February 3rd, he put a completed quality checker online. On that Thursday, the crowd had gone through data.gov.uk and marked up all of the datasets.
Tom posted his initial breakdown to the data.gov.uk community on March 20th:
| HTML - | 252 |
| XML - | 5 |
| Word - | 4 |
| RTF - | 1 |
| OpenOffice - | 1 |
| Something odd - | 85 |
| JSON - | 9 |
| Nothing there! - | 190 |
| CSV - | 12 |
| Multiple formats - | 1211 |
| PDF - | 468 |
| RDF - | 10 |
| Excel - | 408 |
| TOTAL - | 2656 |
Sadly, this is over-optimistic. I've manually checked some of the data
that has been categorised as JSON and RDF. Most of it is not actually
correctly categorised - either people clicked, say, 'RDF' when they
meant to click 'PDF', or they have seen an RSS or Atom feed and
categorised it as RDF.
What this admittedly imperfect dataset is basically saying is that the
vast majority of the 'data' on data.gov.uk is not actually
machine-readable data but human-readable documents.
He will be at the Open Knowledge Conference this weekend, where he will speak about Citizendium and might do the analysis, which he told me was the most important part. When done, it will be very interesting indeed to read it.
© MMX
~RS~q~RS~~RS~z~RS~20~RS~)