The BBC is, and has been for a very long time, at the forefront of wildlife film making from early programmes such as Zoo quest through to blue chip programmes like Life and Radio 4's Life Stories with David Attenborough. However, despite this wealth of content access to it has been limited to broadcasts.

But not anymore.

Over the last few months we've been digitising and segmenting the best of the BBC's natural history archive and putting it online. You can now watch clips from Planet Earth, Wild Africa, Land of the Tiger, Realms of the Russian Bear, Lost Land of the Volcano and many more.

These clips are, I believe, wonderful in their own right - if you want to watch the best bits of your favourite programme you can. But we wanted to go further, to help people discover new programmes from the archive and to gain a better understanding of the natural world; and to do this we built Wildlife Finder.

Wildlife Finder uses programme clips, combines them with other sources of information from around the web and within the BBC to let you find out more about the world's wildlife, its animals, their behaviours and adaptations, and habitats. It does this by providing a page - a URI - for every species, habitat and adaptation the BBC has content on (OK not every species quite yet but we're working on it) and aggregating the information around that link.

We've then provided lots of horizontal navigation around those concepts so that you can, for example, browse from information about an animal directly to another page about its habitat, and from there to a programme or news story. My aim is to provide the 'semantic aspic' for natural history content within the BBC - providing journeys between our programmes, news stories and expeditions and in doing so hopefully help people gain a greater understanding of the world around them.

In addition to opening up the BBC's natural history archive we have also launched a dedicated wildlife news service Earth News and a new site Earth Explorers which provides a more personal insight from crews on location. But none of this means that the BBC has everything covered. For example, we don't have information on the conservation status of a species, nor its distribution - indeed there is lots we don't know, but thankfully there are lots of other really great resources elsewhere on the web.

To help plug these gaps in our information we've partnered with organisations that do have this sort of data - IUCN who compile the Red Data List for data on the species conservation status, WWF to provide distribution data, the University of Michigan to provide information about adaptations and behaviours and the Zoological Society of London to provide information about the threats to our most endangered and unique species. We're also using Wikipedia to provide general background information on each animal, habitat or adaptation.

But we want to add to the information on the web, not replicate what's already there - I believe that's a better use of the licence fee, better for those organisations providing the information, better for the web and better for the audience. I've written before about using the web as a CMS - and this project has adopted a similar approach.

When we publish new content we seek to provide distinctive content - whether that's an Earth News articles or Earth Explorers stories or whether it's information on a species in Wildlife Finder.

But adding new content doesn't mean that we should necessarily add it directly to bbc.co.uk. As I've mentioned we are using Wikipedia to provide background information, but sometime we find errors, sometimes the information isn't good enough and sometimes it's missing (I should point out the these are exceptions - generally the quality is very good).

Rather than fixing this locally within a BBC CMS we instead fix the problem on Wikipedia - creating new pages where needed, or editing those that aren't up to standard. Doing this means that the BBC's website gets better because we transclude the Wikipedia content on our pages, but so does Wikipedia and the wider Web because the content within Wikipedia is licensed under permissive terms so anyone can reuse it.

What next? Well we have a lot of ideas on how to improve the service, we make fortnightly functional updates so hopefully you will see things evolve and improve over time, but there's one thing I did want to touch on which might not be immediately obvious.

In the same way that we are making use of other people's data so we want to make our data available for other to mesh-up. Right now we're only publishing one representation - HTML - but we've designed everything following the Linked Data principles (it's just a really good way of building large, coherent websites) - so for example every resource, not just every page is addressable. For example, here's the URI for the sounds a Common Chimpanzee makes, or the news stories about Giant Pandas.

We will be providing RDF/XML and JSON representation for these URIs in addition to the HTML - the web site thus becomes the API. This means that not only can we link content across bbc.co.uk but others can more easily mesh-up content across the Web. To make that a little bit easier we've reused the Wikipedia URL slugs - the bit at the end of the URL - or as Michael puts it reusing web-scale identifiers.

I hope you like what we've built and enjoy coming back as we add more content and improve the functionally on offer. If you're interested in the data representations we'll be announcing that via the Backstage mailing list.

Tom Scott is Executive Product Manager, BBC.

For years we have been developing and promoting open data standards, enabling data portability. Recent developments have led to web-wide programming APIs and virtualization. It's no longer just our data on the move, it's our applications and even our servers too.

A few of us were there to talk about our development of the programme ontology, the upcoming BBC technology refresh and the new Identity framework, and APML and the attention economy.

Image of Brendan Quinn by Gavin Bell

As you might expect, there's a real sense that we are at a tipping point - a sense that the technologies are starting to enable a new set of opportunities. But this isn't just wishful thinking - there are more companies adopting the underlying technologies which enable data sharing and portability.

As David Recordon of Six Apart noted in Wednesday morning's plenary, open software and hardware have become hip and have given small groups of developers the chance to build interesting web apps - and, more importantly, the chance to get them adopted. This is a new wave of web companies which expose their data via APIs and consume others' APIs. And what is interesting about these companies is that they are converging on common standards - in particular, OAuth and OpenID.

OAuth is a way to share abstract information. It allows you to authorise third party applications and rights over specific features in other applications.

So, for example, you can authorise Dopplr (a service that lets you share travel plans with your friends) to find other Dopplr users within your GMail email account without having to give Dopplr your email address and password. (Giving your password to other people or services is, by the way, a really bad idea.)

And speaking of OAuth, it was great to hear Kellan announce that from June 1st, Flickr will be supporting OAuth alongside the existing Flickr Authentication API. I think that this is really going to be the year we see large-scale adoption of OAuth, which is a good thing: after all, there really is nothing not to like.

The other technology that has quite a buzz about it is XMPP, a messaging and presence protocol. Wednesday afternoon saw Matt, Rabble and Seth stand in for Blaine to run a panel session answering questions about XMPP.

Parts of the web are becoming more and more about real-time conversation - see the rise of Twitter and the recent release of instant messaging in Facebook and presence services like Fire Eagle and Plazes. http isn't a great solution to deliver this kind of real-time data. It's not great because it's very inefficient - to keep up to date, a client application needs to poll the server every few seconds to check whether there's an update and the server needs to deal with this request, even if there is no update. But it needs to work this way round, because http can't push or broadcast information. XMPP can, because it can notify all of the clients that have subscribed to the XMPP server of the update.

Here at the BBC, Matt Wood has been playing around with XMPP, exposing EPG data via XMPP:

At the start of every radio broadcast I'm publishing metadata about that show to its station's node, wrapped in an Atom Entry. For your Linked Data entertainment it's also serialised as Turtle RDF conforming to the Programmes Ontology.

Image: "Rob Lee on Using socially authored content to provide new routes through existing content archives" by Ian Forrester

A final thought: it's also nice to hear about organisations that are exposing their data in machine-readable formats. In addition to our own work on exposing BBC programme metadata as XML, YAML, JSON and RDF, Jeni Tennison from the UK's Stationary Office presented their work to add RDFa to the London Gazette.