Radio 4 has an enormous archive of permanently available programmes just waiting to be discovered. While some of these are well known ongoing programmes, many are in short series or one-off documentaries that are difficult to find.
With programme subjects as diverse as Neptune, barn owls, the Russian revolution, Gothic art, Wittgenstein and time travel it wasn’t easy to find a way of grouping them together to make them easier to find that didn’t involve spending lots of time searching the archive that we’d rather have devoted to programme making.
Our colleagues in news and sport were using linked data to arrange their content and we decided to try the same, using the properties of that data which had already been created elsewhere to provide the connections. We found the links that came from Wikipedia categories were really interesting, with topics such as evolutionary psychology, philosophers of science and astronomical objects known since antiquity alongside the more obvious ones, which we simply couldn’t have added manually ourselves.
We ran a trial of using linked data using Wikipedia categories on In Our Time because it covers such a broad range of subjects including people, places, events and philosophical concepts. This trial beta site got a rating of 4.15 stars (out of 5) on BBC Taster and we received hundreds of helpful comments from the feedback form. We’ve taken that feedback into account and are now starting to introduce this new way of browsing programme by programme, starting with a small handful, including In our Time of course, and gradually adding more over the coming months.
What will this new linked data content look like?
For programmes like this one on Margot Fonteyn you should see a list of topics below the description of the programme, and up to three recommended programmes with a link to the topic which connects them.
Following these links you can either go to the related programme, or to the topic page which will show you all of the programmes under that brand on the same topic. There are also aggregation pages such as this one for Cosmopolitan animals which are not restricted to a single brand, and will allow you to see all of the available content.
Of course, you’ll still be able to navigate by date and A-Z where available, but we hope you’ll enjoy exploring these new connections too.