1. Storylines,
Topics & Tags
An explanation
of the BBC News Data Model
for the News Archive
Powered by BBC Connected Studio
(January 2014 : Belfast & London)

2. Jeremy Tarling: Senior Data Architect, BBC
News.
@JeremyTarling
Matt Shearer: Innovation Manager, BBC News
Labs.
@Completedespair
@BBC_News_Labs

3. linked data tagging
the audience can find and follow content
relevant to them.
topic tag: a person, organisation, place or
theme.
storyline tag: a storyline, or its component
events.

4. why do it this way?
it powers serendipity.
we organise by the “things” people want.
and connect with meaningful links.

5. context
Storyline is an open model.
BBC are now tagging new content.
the archive is not tagged yet.

6. topics - people
Bashar al-Assad
Thamsanqa Jantjie
Lara Clarke
Nick Robinson
a Person can have properties like
‘birth-place’, ‘birth-date’, and
roles like ‘President of Syria’ or
‘interpreter’

7. topics - organisations
an Organisation can have properties
like ‘address’, ‘website’, and can
be notably associated with a person,
place or theme

8. topics - places
Places can have a
latitudes/longitudes and parent
features (an administrative district
or country for example)

9. topics - themes
smoking
health
unemployment
Themes are the intangible things
that we might want to classify our
content by: ‘smoking’,
‘unemployment’, ‘health’

10. storylines
storylines are a way to link up and
present content to the audience as a
narrative
storylines are a special sort of
linked data tag for annotating and
aggregating content
storylines can be tagged with topics

11. an example storyline

12. linking up storylines

13. linking up events

14. tag content with
topics

15. tag content with
storylines

16. tag storylines with
topics…

17. so topics can connect
storylines

18. before we finish
we can’t tag everything manually.
we can autotag topics,
and fingerprint into Storylines.

19. over to you
organise news content by storylines
link storylines together with topics
relate archive storylines to current news
surface unexpected connected stories:
“Death of Mandela”  “Mandela’s life
sentence”  “Thatcher’s foreign policy”
 “Falklands War”  …

20. Thanks
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@BBC_News_Labs