The BBC has provided a W3C Semantic Web Use Case on how Semantic Web Technologies are used on some of the BBC’s Web Sites. The main characteristics of the BBC’s approach is to use the Web as a Content Management System. Sites like the BBC Music, BBC Programmes, or the BBC Wildlife Finder rely on external, publicly available datasets like Musicbrainz or Wikipedia; the BBC sites themselves show an aggregated view of this information, put in a BBC context. Furthermore, the BBC also creates Web identifiers for every item it has interest in; RDF representations of these Web identifiers allow developers to use the BBC’s data to build applications.
About Ivan Herman
Ivan Herman is the Semantic Web Activity Lead at W3C. He graduated as a mathematician at the Eötvös Loránd University of Budapest, Hungary, in 1979. After a brief scholarship at the Université Paris VI he joined the Hungarian research institute in computer science (SZTAKI) where he worked for 6 years. He left Hungary in 1986 and, after a few years in industry, he joined the Centre for Mathematics and Computer Sciences (CWI) in Amsterdam where he has held a tenure position since 1988. He received a PhD degree in Computer Science in 1990 at the Leiden University, in the Netherlands. Ivan joined the W3C team as Head of Offices in January 2001 while maintaining his position at CWI. He served as Head of Offices until June 2006, when he was asked to take the Semantic Web Activity Lead position.
