At the end of July the Guardian held an internalhackday at their offices in King’s Cross. They invited two engineers from BBC Radio’s A&Mi department,Chris Lowis and David Rogers. We teamed up with Leigh Dodds & Ian Davis from Semantic Web specialists,Talisto produce an ‘Interactive-MP-Media-Appearance-Timeline’ by mashing up data from BBC Programmes and the Guardian’s website.

Before the eventTalis extracted data about MPs from theGuardian’s Open Platform APIand converted it into aLinked Datastore. This store contains data about every British MP, the Guardian articles in which they have appeared, a photo, related links and other data. Talis also provide aSPARQL endpoint to allow searching and extraction of the data from the store.

Coincidentally, the BBC programmes data isalso available as a linked datastore. By crawling this data using the MP’s name as the search key we were able to extract information about the TV and radio programmes in which a given MP had appeared. A second datastore was created from the combination of these two datasets, and by pulling in some related data fromdbpedia. Using this new datastore we created a web application containing an embedded visualisation of the data.

Continues @ http://www.bbc.co.uk

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