MetaBroadcast Blog

Today we are very excited to announce the first public release of URIplay, an open media metadata aggregator. A huge range of great audio and video content is now available online, but the content is fragmented across many different sites and platforms, with little connection between one siloed system and the next. We believe in the generative power of the web, we believe in linked data, and we want to see many ways to browse a full range of media content.

Enter URIplay, which aims to provide a single interface to metadata about audio and video content, built through a community effort. It makes light work of integrating content from a range of sources. Some cool things that you can do with today’s release:

• Access podcasts and YouTube data through the same interface—integrate only once for two sources, with more sources to follow.
• Read data using standard RSS or RDF libraries.
• Get context from Wikipedia, for example a list of everything Aaron Sorkin has made.
• Look items up via their iMDB links (using info from Wikipedia and DBpedia).
• Include data from the live web, via Twitter search. For example, what’s hot on YouTube?
• Subscribe to links in iTunes (e.g., this aggregate podcast made from an OPML file of interesting stuff) and in Miro (e.g., this list of the latest YouTube videos discussed on Twitter—paste it into Miro’s box titled ‘Add Channel’).
• Follow links to other sources of data, such as MOAT and Freebase.
• Diagnose the reasons for any latency—we return a breakdown of what we were doing while your app was waiting.

The work for this release has been completed by the MetaBroadcast team, with loads of support from the fine people at BBC RAD Labs. URIplay is a distributed system. The Java URIplay software running at uriplay.org makes calls to other services across the web to compile the necessary data. The BBC has also deployed a URIplay server, which means we can delegate queries regarding bbc.co.uk URIs to them. This launch is just the start of the journey for URIplay. We hope to add much more content over the coming months, find ways to better link disparate datasets, and add more servers. We’re actively seeking further involvement from developers and content publishers. Try our interactive demo at http://uriplay.org/, and join us on our Google Group or at Google Code. Finally, we’ll be releasing the full source code soon, under a permissive open source licence.

UPDATE: The code is now available, over on Google Code

This entry was posted on Friday, March 20th, 2009 at 16:34 and is filed under API, BBC, URIplay. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.