In our latest profile of BBC developer talent, we talk to Yves Raimond of the programmes and on-demand department. A senior software engineer whose work has focused on the BBC's programme index pages, Raimond explains how important it is for the BBC to keep innovating, rather than opting for 'safe' feature developments in its web offering, and push for standards that help make the web a better place.

Raimond joined the BBC two years ago as he was finishing his PhD in 'A Distributed Music Information System' at Queen Mary, University of London. Through the Music Ontology community project he started, Raimond met information architect Michael Smethurst, who was working on BBC/programmes. Inspired by the department's work with the semantic web and linked data, Raimond applied for a post.

Raimond has a degree in engineering from Telecom Paristech in 2005, focusing on artificial intelligence and signal processing. He was also involved in the early stages of the Linking Open Data project, connecting open music databases to create apps that plotted music collections based on the artists' location, or built playlists around crime rates of cities where artists were born.

• What are you working on?

"I have been working on BBC/programmes since I joined the BBC. It provides a permanent web presence for every programme the BBC broadcasts creating one page per programme and all that is completely automated, aggregating data from a number of sources across the BBC.

"Coming from academia it is a very challenging environment. We get about 2.5 million unique users per week, which translates to about 60 back-end requests per second. It is great to contribute to ideas being shaped and implemented, and directly impacting so many users.

"We are working on porting /programmes over to the new BBC technical infrastructure, and using that as an opportunity to improve things like navigation between programme pages. /programmes already provides quite a lot of feeds (RDF, JSON, iCal) and we are also trying to improve the coverage and the consistency of those feeds. I am very keen on external developers building application on top of our data, which provides innovative ways of digging into our programme data, and ultimately drives traffic to our site. A couple of personal favourites include Channelography, FanHubz and RadioAunty.

"I've worked with a very talented team on /programmes, and have worked with very talented people across the BBC, including Patrick Sinclair, Nicholas Humfrey and Chris Lowis, who have all been working on BBC Music. /programmes is now part of the Audience Facing Services team led by Paul Clark.

• How important was the public service principle in your decision to join the BBC?

"Very important. Coming from an academic background, I like the attitude of the BBC towards technical quality and innovation. We have hard deadlines, but we have time to build things the right way instead of rushing in features that can be bad on the long term. The quality of BBC content is also something I took into account - working with such high-quality content is a real pleasure."



• How important is the BBC to the UK's tech industry?

"Extremely important. The BBC had a very large role in standardising formats that are now in use across the whole of the broadcasting industry. In the web space, I think the BBC should play the same role as for more traditional broadcasting technologies - it should promote open standards, contribute to their development, and champion them.

"The BBC should push on standards that make the web a better place. I am hoping that BBC /programmes and BBC Music are, at a smaller scale, pushing those ideas forward. We were the first projects from a large public organisation to publish 'Linked Data', which has now been adopted by the data.gov.uk effort, the New York Times, and more recently by the Guardian within its Open Platform project.

"As we move towards this web of interlinked data - the semantic web - across different organisations, institutions and companies, very interesting applications are starting to appear. We are starting to see that happening."



• Do you worry about the future of the BBC?

"We're seeing some drastic changes across the whole media landscape. The BBC has historically been very good at tackling new media, with a website since 1994 and highly praised projects like the BBC iPlayer.

"However, we are reaching a stage where it is very easy to be drawn towards 'safe' options (re-implementing features that have proved successful elsewhere) instead of constantly innovating and staying ahead of the game."

• What one thing would make the BBC better?

"There is a risk of seeing the web as a set of independent and isolated destinations. Whilst I can understand why this might be appealing from a branding and marketing point of view, the BBC should aim towards more interlinking, enabling users to design their own journeys and to easily navigate between things they are interested in, which might span a multitude of domains across programmes, music, nature, food, places and people.

"Engaging third party developers is very important: it ultimately drives traffic towards our content and it helps us getting new user experience ideas around our data. It is also extremely important to make sure we attract new software engineering talent.

"The involvement of the BBC in semantic web technologies was key to my decision to join it. Our team tried to elevate that as a design principle for /programmes - all the data we use to generate our pages is accessible, at the same location, using content negotiation. Our web site is our API."

Outside the BBC, Raimond writes about semantic web and music technologies on moustaki.org and blog.dbtune.org, and is a regular at Music Hackdays where he helped build Musicbore and TrackDropper. He has also worked on the DBRec project (dbrec.net), generating music recommendations from Linked Data. He's on Twitter and GitHub.



Previous BBC Builders:

• BBC Builders: Tom Scott, and the team behind /programmes and /music

• BBC Builders: Tristan Ferne, and his 'startup' team at audio, music and mobile

• BBC Builders: Matthew Shorter on opening up BBC Music Online

• BBC Builders: Red-button engineer Penny Churchill

• BBC Builders: Web developer Simon Cross on personalisation and the semantic web

• BBC Builders: User experience design expert Nicky Smyth

• BBC Builders: Slave to the algorithm Hannah Fraser

• BBC Builders: Image wizard Crystal Hirschorn

• BBC Builders: R&D's Jigna Chandaria is exploring green media technology

• BBC Builders: Vicky Spengler prototypes the future of TV

• BBC Builders: Jerry Kramskoy's technology is already in your home