The Semantic Web On The Horizon?

It’s all to easy to dismiss the concept of the semantic web as just another one of Tim Berners-Lee’s “look at me i invented the Internet don’t you know” attempts not fall into obscurity, but today I was pointed this morning in the direction of an open email from a developer working within the BBC about the BETA BBC Programmes service, which provides listings for all BBC channels.

We updated the /programmes site today and there are some new views
that might be of use…

See all programmes on a service with broadcasts +/- 7 days from now at
/:service/programmes/a-z
http://www.bbc.co.uk/bbcfour/programmes/a-z
http://www.bbc.co.uk/6music/programmes/a-z

Add /all to remove the 7 day restriction, or /player to show just the
programmes with episodes available in iPlayer:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio1/programmes/a-z/all
http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio3/programmes/a-z/player

Search within a service by adding “/by/:search” after “/a-z”:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/programmes/a-z/by/e
http://www.bbc.co.uk/bbcone/programmes/a-z/by/doctor
http://www.bbc.co.uk/bbctwo/programmes/a-z/by/food/all

Or search within all radio, all tv (soon), or all BBC services:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio/programmes/a-z/by/chris/player
http://www.bbc.co.uk/tv/programmes/a-z/by/east (soon)
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/a-z/by/skating/all

With one known and soon to be fixed exception, all the /programmes
pages should be valid XML (and XHTML!), and hopefully easy to process
with XPath etc.

Not new, but you can fetch schedule data through the /programmes site.
Today’s schedules:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/programmes/schedules/fm
http://www.bbc.co.uk/bbc7/programmes/schedules

Or a schedule for a particular date:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/bbcfour/programmes/schedules/2008/04/28
http://www.bbc.co.uk/bbctwo/programmes/schedules/england/2008/05/22

(Unfortunately, BBC One and BBC Two data outside the London and
England regions can be patchy; we’re working on improving that.)

Add .xml to the end of a schedule URL to get an XML representation, or
.json for JSON. The format of the .xml and .json representations
isn’t fixed yet, but we’re interested in any feedback from people
using them.

I think this is a promising step forward. They know people have been screenscraping their HTML output for years and they’ve responded by providing direct access to the data that people. Of course, there will never be a true Semantic Web until all content providers release the 20th century style stanglehold they like to keep on their content.