[LRUG] [JOBS] BBC News: 2-3 month contract to do some cool stuff with Linked Data

[Matt Haynes]

Hi there,

Over at BBC News we are continuing development of our "News Juicer" 
system. This is a large database that we built to run a series of 
prototyping sessions against inconjunction with developers, designers 
and editorial staff from around the BBC and beyond!

The application is helping us investigate how BBC News may be delivered 
in future by allowing developers to query the news archive in some new 
and interesting ways. From relatively simple stuff like "show stories 
centered within a given geographical region" to much deeper queries such 
as "show stories that mention Conservative politians".

At it's core there is some pretty smart technology involved, we are 
using the Stanford Natural Language Processing Toolkit and then mapping 
output to Dbpedia entities. We have a large Postgres database that acts 
as our "warehouse" and a triple store that end users (developers) can 
make semantic queries against. This is all tied together with ruby, 
rails, resque and hosted on EC2.

We are looking for somebody to come on board for a few months to help us 
prepare for the next round of prototyping. There will maintenance type 
work on the application, which to be honest put together in a bit of a 
rush! But there will also be some quite interesting unexplored tasks 
such as how we describe News events using RDF, how do we improve 
performance of the tagging process, etc. You'll also get the chance to 
work with some pretty clued up people from both the journalism and tech 
side, and also some collaboration with BBC R&D.

If anybody is interested please get in touch for some more info, don't 
be put off if you haven't had much exposure to the linked data side of 
things either - we have a lot of in house knowledge in this area and 
need a versatile developer to help us with our ambitions!

Many thanks,

Matt