If we're talking sematic applications, it might actually be good for an organisation like the BBC (and partner broadcasters to actually sit down and work out some standard ontologies to make it easy for heavy duty (RDF-heavy) applications talk nicely to each other. It may even have some applications in more lightweight formats as it would give developers some clues as to what particular parts of the data streams actually do. This does seem to be a big stumbling block with semantic applications: having ambiguity of terminology across applications. For example, consider a Tx time: a single ontology could specify whether this meant a first transmission or just the latest, whether a timezone is optional or required and so on. And applications could both parse and transform data knowing that this was the case, not guessing.
Now, I might have this wrong - but you're suggesting that there should be a standard way of... describing data.... suggested by the BBC, so that all systems structure their data in the same way? I think the BBC has given up trying to do that even internally, and instead relies on being able to map piece of data A in system X on to piece of data B in systemY, and be reasonably sure they're the same thing. I really get the feeling that 95% accurate mappings between different ways of describing stuff is the best we can hope for. The suggestion of gentle harmonisation is preferable to 'having to do it X way always or else' in any big organisation. And, in fact, any system involving fallible meatbags doing data entry. This is coloured by having spent some time up to my elbows in SMEF and datamodelling at the BBC, and also by trying to persuade editorial teams to enter their HTML metadata vaguely consistently. http://www.bbc.co.uk/guidelines/smef/ - Sent via the backstage.bbc.co.uk discussion group. To unsubscribe, please visit http://backstage.bbc.co.uk/archives/2005/01/mailing_list.html. Unofficial list archive: http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/
