“Pages [on a non-news BBC project using linked data] are performing very well in SEO terms. They sometimes even outrank Wikipedia in Google when people make one word searches for animals, which is no mean feat … And the ongoing maintenance cost of organising this wealth of content is reduced.”
Second, the editorial one:
“Let us picture a scenario where each school has a unique canonical identifier, which is applied to all Government data relating to that school. Or – more likely perhaps – that we have mappings of all the different ways that one school might be uniquely identified, depending on the data source. Now picture that news organisations have also tagged any content about that school with the same unique or a similarly interoperable identifier.
“Suddenly, when a newsworthy event takes place, a researcher within a news organisation has at their fingertips a wealth of data – was the school failing, had the people involved been in any coverage of the school before, does the school have a ‘history’ of related incidents that might build up to a story. We have here a potential application of linked civic and news data that improves the tools in our newsrooms.
“And just because we share some common identifiers for data, it doesn’t necessarily mean producing homogeneous content. It is perfectly possible to imagine one news group producing an application that works out the greenest place to live if you want your child to be in the catchment area of a particular school, and another newspaper to use different sets of data to produce an application to tell you where you need to buy a house if you want to get your child into school x, and have the least chance of being burgled. And then news organisations repackaging these services and syndicating them to estate agent and property websites as part of their B2B activities.”
Tonight I had the pleasure of chairing an extremely informative panel discussion on data and the future of journalism at the first London Linked Data Meetup. On the panel were:
Martin Belam (Information Architect, The Guardian; blogger, Currybet)
To set some brief context, I talked about how 2009 was, for me, a key year in data and journalism – largely because it has been a year of crisis in both publishing and government. The seminal point in all of this has been the MPs’ expenses story, which both demonstrated the power of data in journalism, and the need for transparency from government – for example, the government appointment of Sir Tim Berners-Lee, seeking developers to suggest things to do with public data, and the imminentlaunch of Data.gov.uk around the same issue.
Q: What are the implications of paywalls for Linked Data?
The general view was that Linked Data – specifically standards like RDF – would allow users and organisations to access information about content even if they couldn’t access the content itself. To give a concrete example, rather than linking to a ‘wall’ that simply requires payment, it would be clearer what the content beyond that wall related to (e.g. key people, organisations, author, etc.)
Leigh Dodds felt that using standards like RDF would allow organisations to more effectively package content in commercially attractive ways, e.g. ‘everything about this organisation’.
Q: What can bloggers do to tap into the potential of Linked Data?
This drew some blank responses, but Leigh Dodds was most forthright, arguing that the onus lay with developers to do things that would make it easier for bloggers to, for example, visualise data. He also pointed out that currently if someone does something with data it is not possible to track that back to the source and that better tools would allow, effectively, an equivalent of pingback for data included in charts (e.g. the person who created the data would know that it had been used, as could others).
Q: Given that the problem for publishing lies in advertising rather than content, how can Linked Data help solve that?
Dan Brickley suggested that OAuth technologies (where you use a single login identity for multiple sites that contains information about your social connections, rather than creating a new ‘identity’ for each) would allow users to specify more specifically how they experience content, for instance: ‘I only want to see article comments by users who are also my Facebook and Twitter friends.’
The same technology would allow for more personalised, and therefore more lucrative, advertising.
John O’Donovan felt the same could be said about content itself – more accurate data about content would allow for more specific selling of advertising.
Martin Belam quoted James Cridland on radio: “[The different operators] agree on technology but compete on content”. The same was true of advertising but the advertising and news industries needed to be more active in defining common standards.
Leigh Dodds pointed out that semantic data was already being used by companies serving advertising.
Other notes
I asked members of the audience who they felt were the heroes and villains of Linked Data in the news industry. The Guardian and BBC came out well – The Daily Mail were named as repeat offenders who would simply refer to “a study” and not say which, nor link to it.
Martin Belam pointed out that The Guardian is increasingly asking itself ‘How will that look through an API’ when producing content, representing a key shift in editorial thinking. If users of the platform are swallowing up significant bandwidth or driving significant traffic then that would probably warrant talking to them about more formal relationships (either customer-provider or partners).
A number of references were made to the problem of provenance – being able to identify where a statement came from. Dan Brickley specifically spoke of the problem with identifying the source of Twitter retweets.
Dan also felt that the problem of journalists not linking would be solved by technology. In conversation previously, he also talked of “subject-based linking” and the impact of SKOS and linked data style identifiers. He saw a problem in that, while new articles might link to older reports on the same issue, older reports were not updated with links to the new updates. Tagging individual articles was problematic in that you then had the equivalent of an overflowing inbox.
(I’ve invited all 4 participants to correct any errors and add anything I’ve missed)
Finally, here’s a bit of video from the very last question addressed in the discussion (filmed with thanks by @countculture):
Why news organisations should start thinking seriously about their data