Round up: designing a URL structure for BBC programmes

Michael Smethurst of BBC R&D has written a long, comprehensive and well recieved post on his personal blog: “Designing a URL structure for BBC programmes”. It's a history of how systems like the BBC's Programme Information database (PIPs) and /programme pages work together:

"PIPs version 1 was designed to automate programme pages for Radio 3. PIPs version 2 took the same model and attempted to roll it out over the rest of the national radio networks. Both versions were a single system with 3 parts: data storage, management and publishing. Both predated any BBC dynamic publishing infrastructure by several years and relied on “compiling” pages and parts of pages offline to be FTPed to the live servers..."

And an explanation of the tricky conceptual problems around organising the BBC's programmes in a digital world:

The core of the PIPs data model is the episode. As explained above this is not the broadcast or the media asset but the more platonic grouping of media assets. I’ve heard this described in many ways from assets / broadcasts with the same “editorial intent” to assets / broadcasts telling the same “story”. So for example the Today Programme is a 3 hour broadcast on FM but a 2.5 hour broadcast on LW (the last 30 minutes make way for Yesterday in Parliament) but they’re recognisably the same episode. Or an episode of Casualty might have a BSL version and a non-BSL version but they’re recognisably the same episode...

Over on the official R&D blog Rosie Campbell reports back on “A Weekend of Javascript in Berlin”:

"What really struck me about the conference was how many women were speaking. When I counted up afterwards I realised I had seen equal numbers of men and women, which is almost unheard of at a technology event!"

Also on the R&D blog Libby Miller has an update about "MediaScape: Prototyping Techniques".

Alia Sheikh (also of BBC R&D and author of this recent post "The Challenges of High Frame Rate Video") showed, in a tweet how R&D get a perfect blue screen:

Just in case you missed them, Gavin James has left some comments on Robin Murphy’s post about BBC Things...

...and John Barratt has responded to some of your comments about the new BBC search engine.

"@Guv-nor – With regards the Freedom Fries search the search engine searched for the words ‘Freedom’, ‘Fries’ and ‘Freedom Fries’. On that particular day when you searched the Sir Richard Attenborough result was appearing due to his Filmography that included the film ‘Cry Freedom’. It was also gaining a boost from that article being recently published.

Now that time has progressed the result has now moved down the search results ranking and is currently at position 31 for the search term ‘Freedom Fries’ with the number 1 result coming from 13/06/2005 referencing an earlier story from 2003 when the US congress renamed ‘French Fries’ to Freedom Fries’"

Nick Reynolds is Assistant Editor, BBC Online