The BBC Open Catalogue

It’s interesting to see that the BBC have launched one of the first pieces of their Open Archive project this week.

The BBC Programme Catalogue doesn’t have any actual video footage, but does provide a huge amount of meta-information about the programmes in their archive, so you can do things like find out what was on TV on the day I was born, or all the programmes that Floella Benjamin has been in.

All very interesting, and from a web developer point-of-view, nicely done - Atom and FOAF feeds all over the place; nice little sparkline-like graphs showing how the appearances map over time; and clean, easily-guessable URLs.