Re: [backstage] User story: finding a radio show
Nice story Tom! I love these little tales... shame Mother = fail :-( Good to see that some of the pieces of the jigsaw puzzle (including BBC Search, with it's recentness/keyword weighting) are starting to come together. Not sure if there's any intention to build a 'fuzzy' programme finder round these parts but in /programmes we're certainly working on making it more browsable so that the 'language' scenario will be easier to find. If you tie this with Radio 4 looking to integrate /programmes more closely with their website in the coming months, although quite a radical departure, all change for the good. (having said all that trying to parse such an information rich space as Radio 4 will always be a bit of a challenge) If we continue to make more and more data available in the way we are then i'd hope, that if the need is great enough, someone else will build a 'fuzzy' search before we do ;-) cheers, Jamie. ___ Jamie Tetlow Designer BBC Future Media Technology for Audio Music Interactive Working on: DynPub APS - Dynamic Publishing - Automated Programme Support http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes On 22/2/09 15:49, Tom Morris bbtommor...@gmail.com wrote: My mother is a chronic Radio 4 listener and heard a little bit of a programme the other day when in the car that she thought a friend would be interested in. All she remembered was it was about language and culture. She had the mistaken idea that it was on in the morning. She told me that she had been on the Radio 4 website looking to find it but had no luck. Admittedly, it was quite broad search criteria. I had a go at doing something about it today. First thing I did was make a directory on my Mac, then ran the following command: curl -O http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/programmes/schedules/fm/2009/02/[01-28].xml Then I tried grepping that data, but it wasn't pretty-printed and so gave me the whole day's worth of programming for each result. So I ran the following: xmllint --format *.xml combined.txt This pretty-printed all the XML and wrote it out to a text file. I then opened the resulting file up in MacVim. Here I had a metadata-rich 33250-line text file containing details of all the programmes broadcast on Radio 4 in the last month. I tapped / to start a search and typed in language. It took me to the short_synopsis element of a programme element. I looked at the id, and appended the relevant namespace on the front to give me http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00hlcr2 - I loaded the page in my browser, read the long description to my mother, who said something along the lines of Ooh, yes, that's right!. She then forwarded that link and the link to the show page to her friend by e-mail. Total time for me was about ten minutes. But the point was that she wasn't able to do it herself - she had, as I said, gone through the listings pages and the Radio 4 website and couldn't find it. All this makes me very happy about the BBC's provision of excellent metadata as XML, RDF, ASCII and HTML, without doing any silly API or Web Services nonsense. It's great not only because people can build applications on top of it, but just because nerdy people can find stuff easier. A suggestion for making this better: a sort of 'fuzzy' programme finder - a very user-friendly search page linked to from iPlayer and Listen Again (etc.) that would let you do natural-language searching of programmes, sorted by recentness. So you could go on and select that you saw something on TV or heard something on radio, maybe specify a channel, maybe specify roughly when and throw it a few keywords. (I have to say, I did then just type 'language' into the BBC search, and the first result in the TV Radio Programmes box was the right one. Having spent the last decade or so getting frustrated by the *ahem* less-than-optimal search on bbc.co.uk, that's not the first place I thought to look.)
RE: [backstage] User story: finding a radio show
Yes great story Tom. Can I also suggest you add your idea to the ideastore - ideas.welcomebackstage.com. It just means it won't get lost and many others can view it and comment rather that it be lost in the mailing list like a few have in the past. Ian Forrester This e-mail is: [x] private; [] ask first; [] bloggable Senior Producer, BBC Backstage Room 1044, BBC Manchester BH, Oxford Road, M60 1SJ email: ian.forres...@bbc.co.uk work: +44 (0)2080083965 mob: +44 (0)7711913293 From: owner-backst...@lists.bbc.co.uk [mailto:owner-backst...@lists.bbc.co.uk] On Behalf Of Jamie Tetlow Sent: 23 February 2009 09:31 To: backstage@lists.bbc.co.uk Subject: Re: [backstage] User story: finding a radio show Nice story Tom! I love these little tales... shame Mother = fail :-( Good to see that some of the pieces of the jigsaw puzzle (including BBC Search, with it's recentness/keyword weighting) are starting to come together. Not sure if there's any intention to build a 'fuzzy' programme finder round these parts but in /programmes we're certainly working on making it more browsable so that the 'language' scenario will be easier to find. If you tie this with Radio 4 looking to integrate /programmes more closely with their website in the coming months, although quite a radical departure, all change for the good. (having said all that trying to parse such an information rich space as Radio 4 will always be a bit of a challenge) If we continue to make more and more data available in the way we are then i'd hope, that if the need is great enough, someone else will build a 'fuzzy' search before we do ;-) cheers, Jamie. ___ Jamie Tetlow Designer BBC Future Media Technology for Audio Music Interactive Working on: DynPub APS - Dynamic Publishing - Automated Programme Support http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes On 22/2/09 15:49, Tom Morris bbtommor...@gmail.com wrote: My mother is a chronic Radio 4 listener and heard a little bit of a programme the other day when in the car that she thought a friend would be interested in. All she remembered was it was about language and culture. She had the mistaken idea that it was on in the morning. She told me that she had been on the Radio 4 website looking to find it but had no luck. Admittedly, it was quite broad search criteria. I had a go at doing something about it today. First thing I did was make a directory on my Mac, then ran the following command: curl -O http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/programmes/schedules/fm/2009/02/[01-28].xml Then I tried grepping that data, but it wasn't pretty-printed and so gave me the whole day's worth of programming for each result. So I ran the following: xmllint --format *.xml combined.txt This pretty-printed all the XML and wrote it out to a text file. I then opened the resulting file up in MacVim. Here I had a metadata-rich 33250-line text file containing details of all the programmes broadcast on Radio 4 in the last month. I tapped / to start a search and typed in language. It took me to the short_synopsis element of a programme element. I looked at the id, and appended the relevant namespace on the front to give me http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00hlcr2 - I loaded the page in my browser, read the long description to my mother, who said something along the lines of Ooh, yes, that's right!. She then forwarded that link and the link to the show page to her friend by e-mail. Total time for me was about ten minutes. But the point was that she wasn't able to do it herself - she had, as I said, gone through the listings pages and the Radio 4 website and couldn't find it. All this makes me very happy about the BBC's provision of excellent metadata as XML, RDF, ASCII and HTML, without doing any silly API or Web Services nonsense. It's great not only because people can build applications on top of it, but just because nerdy people can find stuff easier. A suggestion for making this better: a sort of 'fuzzy' programme finder - a very user-friendly search page linked to from iPlayer and Listen Again (etc.) that would let you do natural-language searching of programmes, sorted by recentness. So you could go on and select that you saw something on TV or heard something on radio, maybe specify a channel
