Semantic technology aims to create an interconnected ecosystem through meanings—a much richer and more intelligent network that provides users with vast amounts of information in a faster, easier, and more efficient way. Below, we explain the benefits of semantic relationships and how they are starting to be applied in the mass media sector.
Technology continues to advance and evolve. Sometimes, it can be challenging to keep up with all the developments and learn dozens of new terms, most of them in English. However, it is essential to understand many of these concepts to fully benefit from the advantages they bring to users across various industries.
Semantic technology is not entirely new, but its integration is gradually occurring in specialized fields such as education, healthcare, and mass media.
But what is semantic technology? As its name suggests, it focuses on meaning. It defines and establishes links between data on the Internet (or within a company’s internal network), developing a language that expresses rich interrelationships in a way that both machines and humans can read.
In this way, machines don’t just process empty characters or raw data—they can store, manage, and retrieve information based on its meaning and logical relationships. For example, search engines don’t merely match words requested by the user; they go further, displaying results related to those words.
Achieving a World Wide Web based on semantic relationships was a vision of its creator, Tim Berners-Lee, and many are working towards this goal. To facilitate this, a series of universal standards was established by the international community (developers, researchers, organizations, and users) through the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) to create a “universal medium for data exchange.”
Semantic Relationships in Mass Media
As mentioned, the application of semantic relationships can be carried out in any industry, including mass media—one of the sectors most eager to adopt new technologies. This allows them to provide users with better information while also designing new monetization models.
One of the best examples of semantic technology applied in mass media occurred during the 2010 World Cup at the prestigious British broadcaster BBC. The company’s chief architect, John O’Donovan, described the project as “revolutionary.”
It began with the World Cup website, which contained more indexed pages than the rest of the BBC Sports website combined. Seeing the success of this initiative, the BBC gradually implemented semantic technologies across the organization, culminating in the launch of the BBC Linked Data Platform in January 2013.
The decision to implement this technology for a major event like the World Cup was not random, nor was it an easy task for the team. They had to manage 32 teams, 8 groups, and 776 individual players—a workload far too large for the number of journalists available.
This led to the need for a solution capable of generating vast amounts of content about matches, groups, teams, and players without relying on manual processes, which were simply not feasible.
The use of semantic technology resulted in improved navigation, better content reuse and transformation, higher search engine rankings, partial automation of journalistic processes, and enhanced support for semantic advertising placement.
To understand the specific benefits of these technologies for mass media, let’s take the example of the Olympics where Usain Bolt once again broke a world record in athletics.
When writing the news, the system analyzes and identifies various concepts such as the competition, participants, and times. It then automatically generates additional pages, such as tables and rankings, using the collected information.
The success of the World Cup initiative led to its replication during the 2012 Olympics and eventually its implementation across the entire organization. Semantic relationships became an integral part of the BBC’s strategic vision, adapting to all sections and products without being limited to a single division or journalistic genre.
The integration of semantic relationships across the organization aimed to unify the BBC, addressing a long-standing issue of disjointed workflows. After many years of journalism, the company realized that unification was essential to provide better service to their readers and users.
Transitioning from a traditional system to one that incorporates semantic relationships is challenging and costly, particularly for large corporations with extensive histories. For this reason, a hybrid approach is often recommended. This involves enhancing existing connections and links while developing new services where possible to maximize domain interlinking.
At Ximdex, we believe in the significant importance of semantic technology to help computers “understand” the content we create, facilitating the retrieval, integration, creation, and publication of digital resources. This importance is especially pronounced in sectors like mass media, where information is the raw material. The more enriched and interconnected the data, the higher its quality will be.
