Using socially authored content to provide new routes through existing content archives

In this session I’ll demonstrate and explain a method to use socially authored data as a proxy for currency and as an authoritative information source. This data can be used to provide context and add further contextually relevant content and meta-data to newly published and pre-existing media archives providing new ways to navigate the content.

By looking at how we can use sites like Wikipedia, Freebase and DBpedia as authoritative sources of content and meta-data and utilising services such as del.icio.us to provide a measure of popularity and currency (what is being discussed at this point in time), we can generate additional meta-data that can be used to provide new routes through existing content archives that start to help support a wilfing based browsing approach.

These techniques will be demonstrated via a working prototype that was developed as a research project for the BBC, targeting the main BBC News site, with the aim of augmenting the existing archive and providing different routes through the content.

I’ll examine some of the problems inherent in the method, such as contextual ambiguity (Australia the country vs. Australia the song), bias in the data-sources (e.g. the sheer volume of different tags for Google in del.icio.us) and how some content can be linguistically, culturally or geographically distinct and thus less relevant.