Implementing the Storyline Ontology in BBC News

The Storyline Ontology

Jeremy Tarling @jeremytarlingData Architect BBC News

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news

semantic annotation

journalists ‘tagging’annotating (“tagging”) content

tool embedded into CMSconcept extraction/NLP for topic suggestion

journalists accept/reject suggested topics

pilot – location taggingit worked…

except when big stories broke

we write several articles about thesame storyline

articles…storytelling is fragmented

manual linking decays

massive amount of repetition

from articles to storylinesdevelop a data model to describe a news storyline and its topics

refine our content model to handle granular updates (A/V clip, short-form, social media update, long-form)

ask journalists to annotate (‘tag’) these updates with their storyline

collaborative model development

www.purl.org/ontology/storyline

www.purl.org/ontology/storyline

www.purl.org/ontology/storyline

www.purl.org/ontology/storyline

an example storyline

linking storylines

linking events

tag storylines with topics…

topicstopics are real-world entities, or things

peopleorganisationsplacesthemes

people

a Person can have properties like ‘birth-place’, ‘birth-date’, and roles like ‘President of Syria’ or ‘interpreter’

Thamsanqa JantjieNick RobinsonLara Clarke

Bashar al-Assad

organisations

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

places

Places can have a latitudes/longitudes and parent features (an administrative district or country for example)

themes

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

healthunemployment

smoking

tagging with a topic <:thing> :type <:video> <:thing> :about <:David Cameron>

but is this video clip really about the topic of David Cameron?

about-ness?

tagging with a storyline<:thing> :type

<:video><:thing> :about

<:storyline><:storyline> :slug “Cameron EU statement”<:storyline> :topic <:David Cameron><:storyline> :topic <:European Union><:storyline> :attribution <:Nick Robinson>

topics connect storylines

curation vs automationtwo ways to present tagged content:automatic aggregations where all content tagged with that storyline, event or topic is included in a chronological streammanual curations where a journalist picks and orders content in order to tell a particular story

automatic aggregation

anything with that storyline or topic tag automatically surfaces it in that streamthis could be the default/out-of-hours state for a storyline or topic pageless time-consuming, but no control over tone and sequence

automatic aggregation

manual curation

more time consuming, but greater controlcandidate content is manually selected for inclusion in a storyline or topic pageattribution – manually curated storylines can be attributed to a person or group (internally or publicly)

manual curation

demo?

production tagging with topics and storylines

live pilot of storyline tagging in the Midlands