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Success Story

Expanding Editorial Output for the FIFA World Cup, Delivering 800+ Pages in Weeks

To power its 2010 FIFA World Cup website, the BBC used semantic technology to automate 800+ dynamic, content-rich pages and boost editorial scale, ultimately cutting editorial costs, improving user experience and paving the way for the BBC Linked Data Platform

800+ dynamic, auto-generated pages
2 million+ unique page views/day
1M+ SPARQL queries/day

The Client

UK’s public broadcaster delivering trusted journalism and multimedia content across digital, TV, and radio platforms worldwide

The Challenge

BBC needed to publish hundreds of timely, content-rich pages for the 2010 FIFA World Cup faster than traditional editorial methods could support, without increasing staff or costs

The Solution

Using GraphDB and a Dynamic Semantic Publishing (DSP) framework, BBC automated content generation using ontologies, reasoning, RDF and dynamic HTML aggregation

Technical capabilities

  • Automated generation of 800+ content-rich pages for scalable publishing
  • Leveraged structured data & semantic relationships for faceted browsing, SEO and content reuse

Business outcomes

  • Reduced editorial costs and sped up time-to-publish for large-scale events
  • Enabled structured ad targeting & context-aware delivery for new revenue streams

The Challenge

With 32 national teams, 8 groups, and 776 players, the 2010 FIFA World Cup required more content than the entire BBC Sports site had previously delivered. Creating and maintaining this volume of content with traditional editorial workflows wasn’t feasible.

The BBC’s Future Media division was tasked with solving this problem without scaling up editorial staff. Their goal was to find a smarter way to publish high-volume, structured content that would resonate with fans while reducing operational strain.

The Solution

To meet this challenge, the BBC implemented a Dynamic Semantic Publishing framework powered by GraphDB.

This architecture used ontologies, Linked Data identifiers, and OWL 2 RL reasoning to automatically generate RDF and HTML content.

This allowed for a hybrid publishing model: automation handled the bulk of the content (“edited by exception”), while editors focused on high-priority updates.

Key system capabilities (infographic) 

  • Contextual navigation and faceted browsing based on semantic relationships
  • RDF output and improved search engine visibility
  • Semantic ad targeting for international audiences

The Impact

In just weeks, the BBC launched a World Cup experience that delivered:

  • 800+ dynamic, auto-generated pages for players, teams, and matches
  • 2 million+ unique page views per day, boosted by semantic SEO
  • Significant editorial cost reduction via automation and smart reuse

The user experience also improved, thanks to multi-dimensional navigation that let fans explore content by team, player, match, or topic of interest.

But the real success came after: BBC later scaled this approach across other editorial domains, launching the BBC Linked Data Platform in 2013—putting semantic publishing at the heart of their digital strategy.

Table of Contents

Details

Solution: GraphDB
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Facing Similar Challenges?

Struggling with content demand outpacing editorial capacity, limited ability to repurpose content across platforms or poor SEO performance? Whether you're a media company, public institution, or content-rich organization preparing for high-volume publishing around live events, elections, or breaking news, Graphwise can help you:

  • Automate large-scale content generation using ontologies and RDF  
  • Empower editors to focus on quality, not quantity
  • Improve SEO, ad targeting, and user navigation with linked data
  • Build smarter, interoperable content platforms that scale

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