1. The Storyline Ontology
Jeremy
Data Architect BBC News

3. semantic annotation

4. journalists ‘tagging’
annotating (“tagging”) content
tool embedded into CMS
concept extraction/NLP for topic suggestion
journalists accept/reject suggested topics

5. pilot – location tagging
it worked…
except when big stories broke
we write several
articles about the
same storyline

6. storytelling is fragmented
articles…
storytelling is fragmented
manual linking decays
massive amount of repetition

7. from articles to storylines
develop a data model to describe a news storyline and its topics
refine our content model to handle granular updates (A/V clip, short-form, social media update, long-form)
ask journalists to annotate (‘tag’) these updates with their storyline

8. collaborative model development

13. an example storyline 13

14. linking storylines 14

15. linking events 15

16. tag storylines with topics…16

17. topics topics are real-world entities, or things people organisations
places
themes 17

18. people
Bashar al-Assad
Thamsanqa Jantjie
Nick Robinson
Lara Clarke
a Person can have properties like ‘birth-place’, ‘birth-date’, and roles like ‘President of Syria’ or ‘interpreter’ 18

19. organisations
an Organisation can have properties like ‘address’, ‘website’, and can be notably associated with a person, place or theme 19

20. places
Places can have a latitudes/longitudes and parent features (an administrative district or country for example) 20

21. themes
smoking
health
unemployment
Themes are the intangible things that we might want to classify our content by: ‘smoking’, ‘unemployment’, ‘health’ 21

22. tagging with a topic
<:thing> :type <:video> <:thing> :about <:David Cameron> but is this video clip really about the topic of David Cameron?

23. about-ness? 23

24. tagging with a storyline
<:thing> :type <:video> <:thing> :about <:storyline>
<:storyline> :slug “Cameron EU statement” <:storyline> :topic <:David Cameron> <:storyline> :topic <:European Union> <:storyline> :attribution <:Nick Robinson> 24

25. topics connect storylines25

26. curation vs automation
two ways to present tagged content:
automatic aggregations where all content tagged with that storyline, event or topic is included in a chronological stream
manual curations where a journalist picks and orders content in order to tell a particular story

27. automatic aggregation27

28. automatic aggregation
anything with that storyline or topic tag automatically surfaces it in that stream
this could be the default/out-of-hours state for a storyline or topic page
less time-consuming, but no control over tone and sequence

29. manual curation 29

30. manual curation more time consuming, but greater control
candidate content is manually selected for inclusion in a storyline or topic page
attribution – manually curated storylines can be attributed to a person or group (internally or publicly)

31. demo? production tagging with topics and storylines
live pilot of storyline tagging in the Midlands 31