Hello again, Bereft of any real ideas I asked myself "if you took all the BBC TV shows that are currently on iPlayer and plotted them on a map would it be any use what so ever?"
The result.. http://iplayerlist.mibly.com/map/ Now, I should explain what's going on with this mashup. First of all, from my old iPlayerlist project I scrape bbc.co.uk/iplayer for all the current TV shows (a-z atom feeds help). Then I extract the synopsis from /programmes for each episode. I then throw the episode synopsis at the Beta Open Calais API. This API will extract a ton of concepts, including some geographical information that it thinks the synopsis relates to (don't ask me how, I assume some sort of magic elf reads it). This geographical information (states, countries, towns etc) now includes longitudes and latitude info thanks to Open Calais chatting to Freebase. It works best with the larger synopsis I'm told. Have a look along the east coast of the US to see Stephen Fry (of twitter fame) making his way through each state. Later tonight we should see some more of his journey. I'm still questioning if this is any use to an non techy user. Would my dad like to see a map showing TV shows which relate to them? Anyway, in the future I might add a bit of colour coding on the markers for program type (childrens, factual, comedy etc). Regards, Andy
