The new BBC Music website was launched yesterday, with a lot of Linked Data and RDF goodness. BBC Music provides a truly REST API. Congratulations to the whole team, they did an amazing work! In short, that means that you can easily build applications on top of BBC music data quite easily.

For example, each artist in BBC Music has an RDF representation. For example, Nirvana has an RDF representation, which exposes the aggregated BBC data about this band. The site also supports content negotiation, so doing

$ curl -L -H "Accept: application/rdf+xml" http://www.bbc.co.uk/music/artists/5b11f4ce-a62d-471e-81fc-a69a8278c7da

will lead you to the RDF representation.

Note that this representation includes links to further URIs, allowing you to discover more data, e.g. about members of that band. It also includes a owl:sameAs link to the corresponding DBpedia resource, allowing you to aggregate more data about that band, extracted from Wikipedia's infoboxes.

As an example of a "linked data journey", you can get from Nirvana to Krist Novoselic to the corresponding Krist Novoselic in DBpedia to Compton, California to N.W.A. Lots of really rich data to do interesting thing, like, say, a music recommender :-)

BBC Music also includes RDF representation of reviews, e.g. that one. It also includes an RDF representation of the A to Z, and a search interface returning RDF links to matched artists. For example, here are the results of a search for "Bad Religion", which include a link to an RDF document about it on BBC Music.

Congrats again to Patrick and Nicholas, who did this work on the RDF side of BBC Music!