The BBC, MarkLogic, and Olympics 2012

The below video is a demonstration of how MarkLogic was used at the BBC as one of the innovative technologies and major components helping to drive the delivery of the BBC online 2012 Olympics experience.

Why MarkLogic?  Well, Jem Rayfield, Lead Technical Architect for BBC’s News and Knowledge Core Engineering department, wrote an awesome post describing the details and progression of the BBC infrastructure that the BBC Future Media Team implemented.

In a nutshell, a relational system just would not work for the BBC to accomplish their goals and meet their requirements given:

• the scale of data they wanted to manage
• the speed of how fast they wanted to be able to ingest that data
• the variety of data they anticipated

How does MarkLogic help?  A great post on www.journalism.co.uk helps answer that question.

And what type of volume are we talking about on the BBC site?  Check out these BBC Blog posts on their Record Breaking Start and the Week One Numbers.

Watching the Olympics on the BBC site and interacting with the content was an awesome experience for me.  The BBC tried to be everywhere at the Olympics and I think they did a great job, so, thanks BBC Team!

On a somewhat less BBC-related note, I found these New York Times Olympics visualizations that are just excellent!

• All the Medalists: Men’s 100-Meter Sprint 
• All the Medalists: Men’s 100-Meter Freestyle 
• All the Medalists: Men’s Long Jump

Between the visualizations and my BBC viewing experience, now all I want to do is get my hands on some Olympics data and see what I can do with it in MarkLogic!