BBC Programme Similarity Visualiser
“If you liked … then you might also like …”
Instructions
The selected programme is shown in the centre of the screen, coloured red. Similar programmes are positioned in concentric circles around the selected programme. The closer to the centre, the more similar the programmes are.
Simply click a programme to see programmes related to it. Click and drag on the background to move the field of view. Use the search tool at the top right to find other programmes to analyse.
Neither myself nor this application has anything officially to do with BBC, but the underlying programme data is provided and supported by backstage.bbc.co.uk.
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About
Using the data feed provided by the BBC's Backstage initiative, this tool allows a user to locate programmes which are similar to one another and presents this in an easy to understand visual form. At present the algorithm for determining similarity is pretty rudimentary, simply comparing the genres of each programme. In the future, a more intelligent system could be put in place which could consider identifying comparible keywords in the synopses and also the target audience for the programmes, based on the time of day at which they are broadcast.
The system is written using a combination of Javascript and PHP, with AJAX as a transport mechanism to allow the user interface to work in “real-time”. The raw XML data is parsed by PHP and cached in more manageable objects to increase performance. The client-side user interface is bespoke Javascript and makes use of the excellent Prototype framework. The prototype was put together relatively quickly, so the source code isn't really in a presentable state, but will be released when I get a chance to tidy it up.
Suggestions / Comments
I have yet to implement a feature to allow automatic posting of comments, so please email me and let me know what you think of this prototype and whether you have any ideas or suggestions for future enhancements. I'll aim to post any feedback I receive to this page.