Building coherence at bbc.co.uk

Think of the BBC as a storytelling organisation; then think of the transition needed from
storytelling in the world of linear broadcasting to that of the non-linear, hypertext world
of the web. The value in a website lies not in its implicit (meta)data of the domain model
but rather in the way the domain model overlaps and intersects with other domains. As
ever the links are more important than the nodes because that’s were the context lives:
programmes:segment music:track, programmes:segment food:recipe etc. In this way we
weave new ‘user journeys’ into and out of a domain, into and out of bbc.co.uk. From archive
episodes no longer available online, to a recipe page, to a chef, to another recipe and back
to a recent episode. Using well targeted content specific links we could not only escape the
dead end content silos that characterised bbc.co.uk but point users back to programmes
that would hopefully inform, educate and all that stuff. In building bbc.co.uk/programmes
and bbc.co.uk/music in this way we have kept everything in its right place we’ve built
a sane, maintainable, scalable, accessible site that search engines love and can be easily
evolved to add new features and functionality. So to anyone considering how best to build
websites we’d recommend you throw out the Photoshop and embrace Domain Driven
Design and the Linked Data approach every time. Even if you never intend to publish RDF,
it just works.