Established in 1933, the British Film Institute offers opportunities for people throughout the U.K. to experience, enjoy and discover more about the world of film and moving image culture. As well as a multitude of outreach activities, the BFI holds its own archives of material including written text such as scripts and letters which add to the understanding and experience of a particular film or television programme.
The BFI recently integrated three of its key filmographic data sources into a new database – the BFI Integrated Database, or BID. The database contains 1.2 million actors, directors, producers, film and TV professionals, biographies and filmographies, and has over 810,000 national and international film and television titles, spanning from the silent era to the present day. It includes multiple details such as cast, credits, synopses and production data.
The Business Requirement
BID on the Web
BID presents a comprehensive resource of film and television research data that the BFI wished to share with film enthusiasts and professionals alike. They required a web application to be developed using LAMP technologies that would allow them to present theBID data on the Internet through a web page or a web service.
From the outset, theBID on the Web was envisaged to be an application that would continue to evolve after launch with the ability to add new features well into the future. In order to support this vision, a robust database design and application architecture was required that could facilitate future changes.
Additionally, theBID on the Web application was intended not to directly connect to the BID Oracle database, so the BFI also required a supplier that could undertake custom database development and provide a back-end system that could serveBID simultaneously to hundreds of site users.
The BFI chose Sigmer to fulfil these requirements because of our expertise and our 30 years' collective experience in LAMP technologies.
The Sigmer Solution
One of the first challenges of a software development project is to obtain a thorough understanding of the requirement. From the outset, the Sigmer team worked closely with the BFIBID stakeholders and web design team to create a plan for their application from the user's perspective. This highly productive partnership lasted the duration of the project and helped to promote its success.
Sigmer employed an application architecture that would facilitate change by encapsulating the key functions of the program code. In Web application development, programming tasks and problems can be broadly divided between how data is organised (Data), manipulated (Logic) and presented (Presentation). Each division, or layer, of code communicates with the other to produce the overall behaviour of the application. If this communication always abides by standard rules (or Interface) we can make changes to our application, e.g. adding new fields to a record, in a more controlled fashion by containing them to their relevant level. Such an approach is a well established software design principle but to making it work so successfully with the BID on the Web project required strong analysis, design and coding discipline.
To support the application architecture, Sigmer leveraged the improved Object Orientated Programming support of PHP 5 and the use of XML and XSLT to separate data from presentation. Using its layered application architecture, Sigmer was able to provide a solution whereby all the functions that were available to the Web Browser user were also available to the Web Service user. For the browser interface, the strict adherence to XHTML and CSS standards further enforced the separation of the data and presentation and this allowed the BFI's web design team to work on the visual representation of the site, whilst the Sigmer team perfected the database application.
The BFI's enthusiasm for theBID on the Web project was clearly evident from day one, and with such high expectations, it was important to employ a production process that would involve BFI at every key stage - fostering their enthusiasm and channelling it into the design process.
To this end Sigmer produced a series of prototype applications prior to the alpha and beta versions allowing BFI to see their application evolve and influence its growth.
The Result
TheBID on the Web project was published at http://bfi.org.uk/filmtvinfo/ftvdb/ and was officially launched as the BFI Film and Television Database.
The Film and Television Database allows users to perform three types of searches; a simple keyword search, a category search and a complex search that allows the user to build a query based upon several criteria. Once into a database record, the user can then navigate between different views of a film or television work, showing synopses, cast and production details. Clicking on a cast member or organisation takes you to a page summarising their career with the options to view all their accreditations and events they are associated with. Almost every field that is shown for a filmographic record can be clicked upon to take you to another view of the data and users can spend hours browsing fascinating national and international film and television heritage.
Margaret Luck, BFI Database Project Manager:
"It has been an enormous achievement to transfer all this disparate data onto a single platform. Sigmer’s search functionality and LAMP technology-based database architecture ensures our new Film and TV Database is now available to all via our website. Whether a serious film researcher or a member of the public with a general interest in film is visiting the site, Sigmer’s solution means that they will not only be able to find the relevant information on their subject of choice, but also view the search results according to their particular area of interest.”
