Suggestr - connecting the News industry with BBC tags

Aims

A new intuitive and quick way of tagging news articles with linked data concepts, which opens the BBC's structured data to benefit local News organisations.

Suggestr - a prototype by Outlandish, our partners in this project - represents one of our routes, alongside The Juicer for how we open up and connect the BBC's Structured Journalism with other News on the web, to benefit other News organisations and to improve our audience's News experiences.

How does Suggestr work?

Suggestr is a Chrome plugin, to be used by partner News organisations and publishers.

It enables these publishers to easily submit their content to the BBC, for promotion by BBC Journalists to enhance coverage of News events.

As a journalist at A.N. News Publisher (not BBC) 

0. Arrange for an invite from @BBC_News_Labs
1. Get your invite, and install the Suggestr extension into your Chrome browser toolbar.
2. Publish your content as usual, using your favourite CMS, onto the web.
3. Take your browser to that page on the web - to the article in question that you've just published.
4. Click on the Suggestr plugin on your toolbar.
5. Suggestr will suggest some BBC tags to associate with your content; People, Places, Organisations and Events
6. You decide which ones are most relevant, and add ones that have been missed.
7. Press submit when you are happy
8. Your content will automatically appear in the "related content" area of the BBC Journalist who is looking after that "tag" †
9. The Journalist will place your content, as appropriate by BBC Editorial Guidelines, into BBC News content.

Is it freely available to use?

Not yet. During Autumn 2015 / early 2016 News Labs will be looking for 1 or more News organisations to take part in a pilot, in order to assess the opportunity.

Links

• Outlandish - our partners creating this prototype.

Tweet us at @BBC_News_Labs if you want to find out more.

† - There are ~60,000 tags currently - Journalists look after whole groups of them

Results

• Although the concept was very interesting, we were unable to find an acceptable way of implementing this at scale in the BBC’s systems.