From Bill Thompson, Partnership Manager at the BBC Archive

The BBC has an enormous archive – 1 million hours of tv/radio, photographs, over 7 miles of shelves of printed material, artifacts (tardises, daleks) – job of the archive to serve the needs of the BBC. But growing awareness there is public value in this material – this is area where Bill works in a small team.

First idea was to put digital material online. However, thinking about how to expose content and add value started to infect thinking across corporation. Started to think about online aspects of public space.

• About the creation of material
• Exploiting new technology capabilities (e.g. cameras have embedded GPS)
• Use of content – not just about making programmes, and putting stuff on TV – lots of stuff that never gets broadcast
• Preservation – complex – wide variety of physical formats

All these things need to happen – even just for internal purposes.

Want to make it as open as possible – but there are issues – may contain personal data, need to think about regulatory regime, commercial issues. These are constraints, although not unreasonable constraints.

Want to think beyond the BBC – think at webscale. Would be foolish to do some of these things just at the scale of the BBC – e.g.

• location based stuff – need to make sure what the BBC does fits into wider frameworks.
• Have naming conventions at the BBC, need to look at how this fits with other data outside the BBC.
• Time – knowing when stuff was done – BBC have said they want to publish a time axis of all programmes ever broadcast – so need to decide how to do this – again not something just the BBC interested in.
• Want to bring in users – e.g. university academics

BBC is very creative environment. BBC has huge engineering expertise. Engaging seriously with standards efforts etc. For Bill semantic web is a way of building sustainable approaches.

While we’ve been waiting for the semantic web for a long time, it does seem to be getting closer.

We have more processing power than we know what to do with. We have connectivity. We can store data.

What we don’t have the tools and intelligent agents that allow us to apply reasoning across data. We are talking about Artificial Intelligence (AI) – and these come with very big problems. We haven’t made much progress with AI.

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OK – I admit, at this point I kind of lost track – Bill delved into some of the challenges for creating Artificial Intelligence, and while I felt I was getting the general points, much of the detail washed over me.

I think that one of the key aspects Bill was highlighting was that some AI researchers believe that you can’t have intelligence without a surrounding environment – and it is in the ability of an entity to interact with it’s environment – especially in the sense of taking in, and pushing out, information.

I think Bill’s argument was that when you simply develop software based AI, you don’t have these kinds of interactions, and so you aren’t going to get intelligence.  Bill quoted a book around this topic which I didn’t manage to get the details of, but it reminded me very much of the arguments put forward by Steven Grand in his book “Growing up with Lucy: How to Build an Android in Twenty Easy Steps“. You can read more about Steven Grand’s approach to AI at http://www.scienceagogo.com/news/cyber_life.shtml. I think a quote from this page that relates to what Bill was saying is:

“Central to the Lucy project is researching how an organism gains and uses knowledge, or more appropriately how the process of acquiring and using data are interconnected attributes.”

However, whereas ‘Lucy’ (the Steven Grand project) takes the approach of building a physical entity that can interact with the physical world, I got the impression that Bill was arguing that the semantic web could create an environment in which a more purely software based AI could interact.

Hope that makes sense. It was an interesting talk, and a mind stretching way of closing a very interesting and challenging conference.