The Newslabs APIs are a suite of web service APIs for interacting with Creative Works that we have been tagged with linked data stored in a semantic database (an OWLIM TripleStore ). The APIs are hosted with Apigee. To access them you need to signup for an Apigee account here: http://bbc.apiportal.apigee.com
When creating your App add the Apigee product : bbcrd-newslabs-apis-product
The Newslabs Semantic APIs have been documented using the Postman plugin for Google Chrome. This allows you to try out the APIs alongside the documentation.
Paul Wilton discusses what you can do with these APIs with some examples here
To try the APIs out and view the live docs you can install the Postman plugin here:
Once you install the Postman plugin, you can load all the demo API requests by pasting in the following URL into the Postman import collection feature :
https://www.getpostman.com/collections/502c2685dccb8ca84a2e
Once the collection is loaded, create an ‘environment’ using the Manage Environments link at the top of the page, called say ‘Newslabs API’, and add two key/values , these are
host
: http://data.bbc.co.uk/v1/bbcrd-newslabs
apikey
:
You will then be able to try each API request
Models and Support Data
Ontologies
The tags in the knowledge bases are typically from DBpedia. There a vast amount of relationships between the tags described by the . This ontology can be exploited in the Creative Works Multi-Hop API, allowing you to find articles based on the of things that they might be tagged with, and moreover through the graph relationships that connects the DBpedia concepts together. An exmaple of this is in the Postman collection. A good way of finding out what DBpedia properties a concept has is to resolve its URI in a browser, e.g.
We also have Storyline and Event concepts tagged on Creative Works which are modelled using BBC Ontologies . The class (type) of a Storyline concept is http://purl.org/ontology/storyline/Storyline . The class (type) of an Event is http://www.bbc.co.uk/ontologies/news/Event.
JSON-LD Responses from the Creative Works API endpoints are typically described using properties from the Creative Works Ontology , the Core Concepts Ontology and the BBC Ontology .
Products
We have extended the BBC Ontology to define additional products to classify Creative Works by. Many of the Newslabs APIs allow for filtering results by product. These products are :
| B31Voices | BBCsnippets | BirminghamMail |
| Elvis | ENPS | Jupiter |
| Monitoring | Product | News |
| NewsWeb | TheNewYorkTimes | TheFinancialTimes |
| TheGuardian | TheTimes | TheEveningStandard |
| TheMirror | TheHuffingtonPost | TheIndependent |
| SkyNews | BirminghamPost | Dudley |
| ExpressStar | Halesowen | Stourbridge |
| TheScotsman | TheIrishTimes | IrishIndependant |
| DailyRecord | TheIrishSun | BelfastTelegraph |
| TheIrishDailyStar | RTE | HuddersfieldExaminer |
| SheffieldStar | YorkshirePost | YorkPress |
| RotherhamAdvertiser | DoncasterFreePress | STV |
| YorkshireEveningPost | HalifaxCourier |
When applying each product in an API it must be a fully qualified URI in the form :
http://www.bbc.co.uk/ontologies/bbc/TheIrishTimes
Finally..
Remember this is R&D so stability and rocket fast performance is not 100% guaranteed
Good Luck !