With more and more TV and radio programmes being made and more and more ways of accessing them (e.g. digital broadcasts, PVRs or downloading) one of the major challenges is how to find things and how to describe things. Currently the metadata describing these programmes is often very poor. To start to address this BBC Radio & Music Interactive have developed a prototype wiki-like interface for collaboratively chopping up radio programmes into segments and annotating and tagging each segment.

So we are using our audience to generate additional metadata for our programmes. But why would our audience want to do this? Because they will get a much better described programme, increasing it’s findability, and so they get new ways of exploring within programmes. There are potentially all sorts of searches and custom downloads of the marked-up and chopped-up programme that we could provide with this metadata. And the benefit for the BBC is that we get loads of lovely metadata that we don’t already have.

The interface for the application uses a seamless combination of Flash for the audio playback and mark-up and HTML/Javascript for the descriptive elements to provide a familiar wiki-like environment. The MySQL/Python back-end incorporates an XML-based REST API to promote further use of the metadata.

This paper describes the application; how it works, how we built it and how people use it.