The
BBC Domesday Project was a partnership between Acorn Computers Ltd,
PhilipsKoninklijke Philips Electronics N.V. , most commonly known as Philips, is a Dutch electronics company.Philips is one of the largest electronics companies in the world. In 2007, its sales were €26.79 billion...
, Logica and the
BBCThe British Broadcasting Corporation, usually referred to by its abbreviation as the "BBC", is the longest established and largest broadcaster in the world...
(with some funding from the
European CommissionThe European Commission acts as an executive of the European Union. The body is responsible for proposing legislation, implementing decisions, upholding the Union's treaties and the general day-to-day running of the Union.The Commission operates in the method of cabinet government, with 27...
's
ESPRITESPRIT was a series of integrated programmes of IT research and development projects and industrial technology transfer measures. It was a European Union initiative managed by the Directorate General for Industry of the European Commission...
programme) to mark the 900th anniversary of the original
Domesday BookThe Domesday Book is the record of the great survey of England completed in 1086, executed for William I of England, or William the Conqueror...
, an
11th centuryAs a means of recording the passage of time, the 11th century is the period from 1001 to 1100 in accordance with the Julian calendar in the Christian/Common Era.
...
censusA "census" is the procedure of systematically acquiring and recording information about the members of a given population. It is a regularly occurring and official count of a particular population.In other words every 10 years...next one would be in 2010 The term is used mostly in connection with...
of
EnglandEngland is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Scotland to the north and Wales to the west; the Irish Sea is to the north west, the Celtic Sea to the south west and the North Sea to the east, with the English Channel to the south separating it from continental...
. It is frequently cited as an example of
digital obsolescenceDigital obsolescence is a situation where a digital resource is no longer readable because the physical media, the reader required to read the media, the hardware, or the software that runs on it, is no longer available. A prime example of this is the BBC Domesday Project...
on account of the physical medium used for data storage.
This new
multimediaMultimedia is media and content that uses a combination of different content forms. The term can be used as a noun or as an adjective describing a medium as having multiple content forms. The term is used in contrast to media which only use traditional forms of printed or hand-produced material...
edition of Domesday was compiled between 1984 and 1986 and published in 1986.
The
BBC Domesday Project was a partnership between Acorn Computers Ltd,
PhilipsKoninklijke Philips Electronics N.V. , most commonly known as Philips, is a Dutch electronics company.Philips is one of the largest electronics companies in the world. In 2007, its sales were €26.79 billion...
, Logica and the
BBCThe British Broadcasting Corporation, usually referred to by its abbreviation as the "BBC", is the longest established and largest broadcaster in the world...
(with some funding from the
European CommissionThe European Commission acts as an executive of the European Union. The body is responsible for proposing legislation, implementing decisions, upholding the Union's treaties and the general day-to-day running of the Union.The Commission operates in the method of cabinet government, with 27...
's
ESPRITESPRIT was a series of integrated programmes of IT research and development projects and industrial technology transfer measures. It was a European Union initiative managed by the Directorate General for Industry of the European Commission...
programme) to mark the 900th anniversary of the original
Domesday BookThe Domesday Book is the record of the great survey of England completed in 1086, executed for William I of England, or William the Conqueror...
, an
11th centuryAs a means of recording the passage of time, the 11th century is the period from 1001 to 1100 in accordance with the Julian calendar in the Christian/Common Era.
...
censusA "census" is the procedure of systematically acquiring and recording information about the members of a given population. It is a regularly occurring and official count of a particular population.In other words every 10 years...next one would be in 2010 The term is used mostly in connection with...
of
EnglandEngland is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Scotland to the north and Wales to the west; the Irish Sea is to the north west, the Celtic Sea to the south west and the North Sea to the east, with the English Channel to the south separating it from continental...
. It is frequently cited as an example of
digital obsolescenceDigital obsolescence is a situation where a digital resource is no longer readable because the physical media, the reader required to read the media, the hardware, or the software that runs on it, is no longer available. A prime example of this is the BBC Domesday Project...
on account of the physical medium used for data storage.
This new
multimediaMultimedia is media and content that uses a combination of different content forms. The term can be used as a noun or as an adjective describing a medium as having multiple content forms. The term is used in contrast to media which only use traditional forms of printed or hand-produced material...
edition of Domesday was compiled between 1984 and 1986 and published in 1986. It included a new 'survey' of the United Kingdom, in which people, mostly school children, wrote about geography, history or social issues in their local area or just about their daily lives. This was linked with maps, and many colour photos, statistical data, video and 'virtual walks'. Over 1 million people participated in the project. The project also incorporated professionally-prepared video footage,
virtual realityVirtual reality is a technology which allows a user to interact with a computer-simulated environment, whether that environment is a simulation of the real world or an imaginary world...
tours of major landmarks and other prepared datasets such as the 1981 census.
Format
The project was stored on adapted
laserdiscThe Laserdisc is an obsolete home video disc format, and was the first commercial optical disc storage medium. Initially marketed as Discovision in 1978, the technology was licensed and sold as Reflective Optical Videodisc, Laser Videodisc, Laservision, Disco-Vision, DiscoVision, and MCA...
s in the LaserVision Read Only Memory (LV-ROM) format, which contained not only analogue video and still pictures, but also digital data, with 300 MB of storage space on each side of the disc. Data and images were selected and collated by the BBC Domesday project based in Bilton House in West Ealing. Pre-mastering of data was carried out on a
VAX-11/750The VAX-11 is a family of minicomputers developed and manufactured by Digital Equipment Corporation using processors implementing the VAX instruction set architecture . The VAX-11/780 was the first VAX computer.- VAX-11/780 :...
mini-computer, assisted by a network of BBC micros. The discs were mastered, produced, and tested by Philips at their Eindhoven headquarters factory. Viewing the discs required an Acorn
BBC MasterThe BBC Master was a home computer released by Acorn Computers in early 1986. It was designed and built for the British Broadcasting Corporation and was the successor to the BBC Micro Model B.The Master featured several improvements on its predecessor...
expanded with an
SCSISmall Computer System Interface, or SCSI , is a set of standards for physically connecting and transferring data between computers and peripheral devices. The SCSI standards define commands, protocols, and electrical and optical interfaces...
controller and an additional
coprocessorA coprocessor is a computer processor used to supplement the functions of the primary processor . Operations performed by the coprocessor may be floating point arithmetic, graphics, signal processing, string processing, Savitsky-Golay derivation, or encryption. By offloading processor-intensive...
controlled a Philips VP415 "Domesday Player", a specially-produced laserdisc player. The user interface consisted of the BBC Master's keyboard and a
trackballA trackball is a pointing device consisting of a ball held by a socket containing sensors to detect a rotation of the ball about two axes—like an upside-down mouse with an exposed protruding ball. The user rolls the ball with the thumb, fingers, or the palm of the hand to move a cursor. Large...
(known at the time as a trackerball). The software for the project was written in
BCPLBCPL is a computer programming language designed by Martin Richards of the University of Cambridge in 1966.- Design :...
(a precursor to
CC is a general-purpose computer programming language developed in 1972 by Dennis Ritchie at the Bell Telephone Laboratories for use with the Unix operating system....
), to make cross platform porting easier, although BCPL never attained the popularity that its early promise suggested it might.
The project was split over two laserdiscs:
- The Community Disc contained personal reflections on life in Britain and is navigated on a geographic map of Britain. The entire country was divided into blocks that were 4 km wide by 3 km tall, based on Ordnance Survey
Ordnance Survey is an executive agency of the United Kingdom government. It is the national mapping agency for Great Britain, and one of the world's largest producers of maps...
grid references. Each block could contain up to 3 photographs and a number of short reflections on life in that area. Most, but not all, of the blocks are covered in this way. In addition more detailed maps of key urban areas and blocks of 40x30 km and regional views were captured, allowing "zoom-out" and "zoom-in" functions. The community disc was double sided, with a "Southern" and a "Northern" side, although country-wide data at the 40x30km level and above was on both sides.
- The National Disc contained more varied material, including data from the 1981 census
A "census" is the procedure of systematically acquiring and recording information about the members of a given population. It is a regularly occurring and official count of a particular population.In other words every 10 years...next one would be in 2010 The term is used mostly in connection with...
, sets of professional photographs and virtual realityVirtual reality is a technology which allows a user to interact with a computer-simulated environment, whether that environment is a simulation of the real world or an imaginary world...
-like walkarounds shot for the project. Side 2 of the National disc contained video material. The material was stored in a hierarchy and some of it could be browsed by walking around a virtual art gallery, clicking on the pictures on the wall, or walking through doors in the gallery to enter the VR walkarounds. In addition a natural language search was provided via an English stemming and matching algorithm to a set of keywords.
Preservation
In 2002, there were great fears that the discs would become unreadable as computers capable of reading the format had become rare and drives capable of accessing the discs even rarer. Aside from the difficulty of emulating the original code, a major issue was that the still images had been stored on the laserdisc as single-frame analogue video, which were
overlaidGenlock is a common technique where the video output of one source, or a specific reference signal, is used to synchronize other television picture sources together. The aim in video and digital audio applications is to ensure the coincidence of signals in time at a combining or mixing or...
by the computer system's graphical interface. The project had begun years before
JPEGIn computing, JPEG is a commonly used method of compression for photographic images. The degree of compression can be adjusted, allowing a selectable tradeoff between storage size and image quality...
image compression and before
truecolourTruecolor is a method of representing and storing graphical image information in an RGB color space such that a very large number of colors, shades, and hues can be displayed in an image, such as in high quality photographic images or complex graphics...
computer video cards had become widely available.
However, the BBC later announced that the
CAMiLEONThe CAMiLEON project was a joint undertaking by the University of Michigan and the University of Leeds to develop and evaluate a range of technical strategies for the long term preservation of digital material suffering from digital obsolescence...
project (a partnership between the
University of LeedsThe University of Leeds is a major teaching and research university in Leeds, West Yorkshire and, with over 33,000 full-time students, is the second largest single site university in the United Kingdom. In the world university league tables published in November 2008, the university's ‘employer...
and
University of MichiganThe University of Michigan, Ann Arbor is a public research university located in the state of Michigan in the United States. It is the state's oldest university, the flagship campus of the University of Michigan, and one of the top public universities in the world...
) had developed a system capable of accessing the discs using
emulationAn emulator in computer sciences duplicates the functions of one system using a different system, so that the second system behaves like the first system...
techniques. CAMiLEON copied the video footage from one of the extant Domesday laserdiscs. Another team, working for the UK National Archives (who hold the original Domesday Book) tracked down the original 1-inch videotape masters of the project. These were digitised and archived to Digital Betacam.
A version of one of the discs was created that runs on a Windows PC. This version was reverse-engineered from an original Domesday Community disc and incorporates images from the videotape masters. It was initially available only via a terminal at the National Archives headquarters in Kew, Surrey but was published on the web in July 2004. This version was taken off-line early in 2008 when its programmer, Adrian Pearce, suddenly died.
The deputy editor of the Domesday Project, Mike Tibbets, has criticized the bodies to which the archive material was originally entrusted, arguing that the creators knew that the technology would be short lived but that the archivists had failed to preserve the material effectively.
Copyright issues
In addition to preserving the project, untangling the
copyrightCopyright is a form of intellectual property that gives the author of an original work exclusive right for a certain time period in relation to that work, including its publication, distribution and adaptation, after which time the work is said to enter the public domain...
issues also presents a significant challenge. In addition to copyright surround the many contributions made by the estimated 1 million people who took part in the project, there are also copyright issues that relate to the technologies employed. It is likely that the Domesday Project will not be completely free of copyright restrictions until at least 2090.
External links