Last night me and Yves gave a presentation to the London Web Standards group on Linked Data. We promised to put the slides online...

Go to the Radio Labs blog to read the rest of A skim-read introduction to linked data, to view the slide show and to leave your comments.

Michael Smethurst is Information Architect, Audio & Music Interactive, BBC FM&T.

Read more (and there is a lot more!) and comment at BBC Radio labs blog.

As a warning there's very little original thinking in here. For those familiar with the concept of one web, the importance of persistent URIs, REST, Domain Driven Design and Linked Open Data it'll probably be old news. Possibly it's interesting to see all these threads tied up in one place!?! Maybe it's interesting to see them all from a user experience point of view?!? Anyway, as ever, it's built on the thinking and achievements of many clever people over many years who are too numerous to mention here. Although obviously I'll make an exception for Paul Clifford and TimBL. :)

The presentation is here and the (slightly) expanded text is below for the sake of accessibility and Google.

Read more and comment at BBC Radio Labs.

Michael Smethurst is Information Architect, A&Mi, BBC Future Media & Technology

Late last year we got quite excited about Open Library. Using the open word always seems to tick our boxes. We chatted about the prospect of a comprehensive, coherent BBC books site heavily interlinked with BBC programmes. Every dramatisation of a novel, every poetry reading, every author interview and profile, every play linked to / from programmes. The prospect of new user journeys from programme episode to book to author to poem and back to episode still seems enticing. We started to wonder if we could use Open Library as the backbone of this new service in the same way we use MusicBrainz open data as the backbone of /music.

Unfortunately when we looked more closely an obvious problem came to light.

Open Libary is based on Amazon book data and Amazon is based on products.

Correction 16.01.09: OpenLibrary is NOT based on Amazon data (see Tim's comment). For now it models books in a similar fashion to Amazon (as publications/products not cultural artifacts). OpenLibrary are looking to enhance this model to allow grouping of publications into works which is fantastic news. If you can contribute code or knowledge I'd encourage you to do so.

And the BBC isn't all that interested in products. Neither are users.

Read more and comment at BBC Radio Labs blog.

Michael Smethurst is Information Architect, A&Mi, BBC Future Media & Technology

I've started to wrap a Ruby on Rails app around it and the results can be seen here. For now, it's pretty basic with lots of gaps left to fill - but the intention is to link it to MusicBrainz / DBpedia and to publish the results into the Linking Open Data cloud.

Read more and comment at the BBC Radio Labs blog.

Michael Smethurst is Information Architect, FM&T for BBC Audio & Music Interactive.

Read more and comment at the BBC Radio Labs blog.

Michael Smedhurst is an Information Architect at BBC Audio & Music Interactive.

Unfortunately there have been a number of concerns over hCalendar's use of the abbreviation design pattern. This uses the HTML abbreviation element to add machine data to pages. Our concerns were:

• the effect on blind users using screen readers with abbreviation expansion turned on where abbreviations designed for machines would be read out
• the effect on partially sighted users using screen readers where tool tips of abbreviations designed for machines would be read out
• the effect of incomprehensible tooltips on users with cognitive disabilities
• the potential fencing off of abbreviations to domains that need them (travel - airport codes, finance - ticker symbols etc)

Read more and comment at the Radio Labs blog.

Michael Smethurst is an Information Architect at BBC Audio & Music Interactive.