The BBC has just released some early info on a new database that will drive access to its entire archive — massively detailed show notes from thousands and thousands of programs, there for the taking, with extensive APIs and other tools for the media-hackers among us:
In the early part of next year, you can look forward to a public beta with extensive programme details and broadcast histories. There are "On This Day" schedules that go back to 1933. It's got full contributor histories, and Really Good Search. I can't begin to describe the depth of this dataset – it had an entry for the one time in the 1990s when my dad was on local TV news as a spokesman for Oxfordshire County Council. The cataloguers have worked hard on this stuff for years, and it deserves a wide audience.
Here are some early screenshots: searching for John Peel; John Peel's contributor page. The design's not finished yet, but they give you a flavour of the data.
Oh yes, there's also plenty of web 2.0 goodness: Ajax, feeds for everything, tags, full read-only REST API including FOAF for all contributors, and it's all run with Ruby on Rails. Yes, the BBC have allowed me (after some persuasion) to rapidly prototype and deploy this 7,000,000-row database-backed site in everyone's new favourite web framework. This first version is really just a prototype; wisely, the BBC have decided to get it out there quick and see the public reaction.
(via Ben Hammersley)
