Link wrap: semantic BBC and linking out

A couple more links from this morning’s tab-clearing activities.

Semantic BBC

Been meaning to point to this for a while. Interesting post about how BBC used dynamic semantic publishing on its World Cup 2010 website.

The underlying publishing framework does not author content directly; rather it publishes data about the content – metadata. The published metadata describes the world cup content at a fairly low-level of granularity, providing rich content relationships and semantic navigation. By querying this published metadata we are able to create dynamic page aggregations for teams, groups and players.

The foundation of these dynamic aggregations is a rich ontological domain model. The ontology describes entity existence, groups and relationships between the things/concepts that describe the World Cup. For example, “Frank Lampard” is part of the “England Squad” and the “England Squad” competes in “Group C” of the “FIFA World Cup 2010″.

The ontology also describes journalist-authored assets (stories, blogs, profiles, images, video and statistics) and enables them to be associated to concepts within the domain model. Thus a story with an “England Squad” concept relationship provides the basis for a dynamic query aggregation for the England Squad page “All stories tagged with England Squad”.

The journalists use a web tool, called ‘Graffiti’, for the selective association – or tagging – of concepts to content. For example, a journalist may associate the concept “Frank Lampard” with the story “Goal re-ignites technology row”.

In addition to the manual selective tagging process, journalist-authored content is automatically analysed against the World Cup ontology. A natural language and ontological determiner process automatically extracts World Cup concepts embedded within a textual representation of a story. The concepts are moderated and, again, selectively applied before publication. Moderated, automated concept analysis improves the depth, breadth and quality of metadata publishing.

Rest of post is here.

Linking Out

Martin Belam looks at linking out from news sites and raises a couple of interesting issues. Here’s an abbreviated excerpt:

I see too little debate about what the audience want or expect in terms of links. Just because deep inline linking is the cultural norm for bloggers, it doesn’t follow that ‘links are good’ should be adopted as a religious mantra.

There are several clear use cases where additional links on news stories should be added as a matter of course, though – stories that reference medical or scientific reports, stories that reference published consultation papers, stories where quotes and pictures are sourced directly from the web, and stories specifically about websites.

There are some other key user experience considerations though.

Should external links be signalled in a different way from internal links? You can do this easily if you have a ‘Related links to this story’ component, but what about inline links? Using different colours on different types of links within an article won’t make it obvious to the user what is going on, and littering body copy with icons and (External link) parentheses doesn’t make for a great reading experience.

Another issue to consider is the consistent requests from a number of users for external links to open in a new browser window.  Chris Wheal says:

“I prefer external links to open new windows. This means no matter how many further links people follow, your website remains open in their browser.”He links to the RNIB’s advice on the matter. Not only for accessibility reasons, but the good practice of leaving the user in control of how their browser is behaving, opening links in new windows is to be avoided with almost everything except an audio player. But should you build a little widget that allows users the option of turning on ‘external links open in a new browser’ during their session on your site?

Rest of the post is here.