Semantic Web, the World Cup, and the BBC

Here's an interesting post that's appeared on the BBC's Internet Blog exploring the use of semantic web technologies in powering their (rather substantial) World Cup site. It's a fairly technical document casually dropping the semantic web monkey's favourite buzzwords and acronyms (RDF triples, metadata, ontologies, XML, SPARQL), but it serves as an excellent and easily followed demonstration of the power semantic web technologies can provide on a large scale, highly-exposed platform. As you can imagine, for an article combining football and semantic web, Mummi's been drooling over this one all morning...

The site features 700-plus team, group and player pages, which are powered by a high-performance dynamic semantic publishing framework. This framework facilitates the publication of automated metadata-driven web pages that are light-touch, requiring minimal journalistic management, as they automatically aggregate and render links to relevant stories. ... The development of this new high-performance dynamic semantic publishing stack is a great innovation for the BBC as we are the first to use this technology on such a high-profile site.