Introduction
Muddy Boots is a set of projects commissioned by the BBC, looking at ways of using commons generated data and social metadata to enhance the BBC News archive.
Semantic Web Project
The Semantic Web Project was commissioned to try and answer the question 'Who is involved in a news story?'. It does this by identifying the 'main actors' (people and companies) in a story and then linking those actors to their entries in DBpedia. In this way, the system relates any BBC News story to DBpedia (and thus the wider semantic web). These actors are marked up in the story using Microformats and a 'Featured Actors' sidebar is added with information retrieved from DBpedia.
See the Muddy Boots Semantic Web project →
Related Links Project
The Related Links Project was commissioned to improve the way people find and navigate their way around BBC and non-BBC content within a BBC News story. It does this by identifying the key terms in a story and using DBpedia and del.icio.us to retrieve interesting related links to any story.