Case Study: BBC Sport achieves scalable, automated World Cup publishing with Ontotext

BBC Boosted Efficiency and Reduced Cost by Using Semantic Publishing to Power the FIFA World Cup Website

The BBC’s Future Media team faced a major content challenge for the 2010 FIFA World Cup: managing coverage for 32 teams, 8 groups and 776 players with far too many pages and too few journalists. They needed to move from a static CMS to a dynamic, consumer-focused publishing model that reduced manual editorial work while improving navigation and content reuse.

Using Ontotext’s GraphDB, the BBC implemented a Dynamic Semantic Publishing framework based on RDF, ontologies and SPARQL to generate and curate HTML and linked-data aggregations. The site produced 800+ dynamic pages, handled about 2 million unique page requests and 1 million SPARQL queries per day, supported hundreds of repository updates per minute with OWL 2 RL reasoning, and ran on a resilient multi–data-center triplestore—delivering better SEO, automated content creation, lower production costs and a platform later expanded across BBC Sport and into a BBC Linked Data Platform.

BBC Sport

John O’Donovan

Chief Technical Architect