Progress > Case Studies > Scaling to Olympic Proportions

Scaling to Olympic Proportions

Customer Company Size

Large Corporate

Region

Europe

Country

United Kingdom

Product

OWLIM Triple Store
MarkLogic Server
BBC iPlayer

Tech Stack

NoSQL
XML
Linked-data technology

Implementation Scale

Enterprise-wide Deployment

Impact Metrics

Customer Satisfaction
Brand Awareness

Technology Category

Analytics & Modeling - Real Time Analytics

Applicable Industries

Telecommunications

Applicable Functions

Sales & Marketing
Business Operation

Use Cases

Real-Time Location System (RTLS)
Process Control & Optimization

Services

Data Science Services
System Integration

About The Customer

The British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) is a public service broadcaster, headquartered at Broadcasting House in Westminster, London. It is the world's oldest national broadcaster, and the largest broadcaster in the world by number of employees, employing over 22,000 staff in total, of whom approximately 19,000 are in public sector broadcasting. The BBC is established under a Royal Charter and operates under its Agreement with the Secretary of State for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport. Its work is funded principally by an annual television licence fee which is charged to all British households, companies, and organisations using any type of equipment to receive or record live television broadcasts and iPlayer catch-up.

The Challenge

The British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) was tasked with providing comprehensive coverage of the 2012 Summer Olympic Games in London. The challenge was to cover more than 10,000 athletes, cater to a sophisticated audience increasingly reliant on social media, provide continuous live coverage, and deliver content across multiple channels. The traditional method of Static Publishing, which had been relied on for over 15 years, was no longer sufficient. The BBC needed to transition to a Dynamic Publishing infrastructure, which involves creating a collection of related data elements and dynamically serving it as audiences demand. The flow of content was enormous, non-stop, real-time and went across every channel from web, mobile, tablets and broadcast.

The Solution

The BBC implemented a Dynamic Publishing system that relied on two key components: An enterprise NoSQL content store and a “triple store.” The triple store uses linked-data technology to automate aggregation, publishing and repurposing of interrelated content objects – all driven by an ontological, domain-modeled information architecture. This system conveyed that “Michael Phelps” was a member of the 2012 Olympic team, a member of the US swim team, of the men’s swim team, of the 4x200-Meter Freestyle Relay, competed in events and heats and won a variety of different “awards.” The triple store alone, however, could not process and store the massive amount of changing data. To handle the volume and ensure ability to scale, the BBC added a MarkLogic to store all assets including stats, tweets, video metadata, images and articles. Video metadata included transcriptions to time-codes, so specific segments of video could be served. MarkLogic is an enterprise NoSQL database that uses XML as its data model. It allows the easy load of multiple data types into a single database – regardless of schema, processes high volumes of content and data in real time and scales as needed with a shared nothing architecture.

Operational Impact

The BBC Dynamic Publishing system produced a record number of content pages that maximized the editorial effort to creating the relationships and content and leveraged the system to create the index pages, team pages, schedules and additional content fed to users as they interacted with content.
By encouraging second-screen behavior, social media became an integral part of the coverage. The user could customize the feed by choosing content elements that would appear on the BBC’s iPlayer.
The combination of OWLIM Triple Store and MarkLogic Server allowed an unparalleled level of automation and dynamic delivery.

Quantitative Benefit