About twenty years ago, a team that I was lucky enough to work with during my time at the BBC, was working on the BBC’s programme information platform. This is a resource designed to be a companion to BBC iPlayer, specifically to provide the public with information about the programmes they watch and listen to. One of the core user needs, for instance, that was identified early on in the development of the platform, was the ability to provide information for the audience about the songs used in TV programmes - because this was one of the most common questions the BBC’s switchboards and help desks would handle, back in the early-to-mid 2000s.

The key insight that made this platform so different and potentially revolutionary at the time, is something that, I think, was missed by many. It’s one of the core fundamental philosophical building blocks of the Web that is, to this day, relatively untapped. And when it comes to the digital, networked manifestation of narrative and the experience of storytelling, I think it’s something worth exploring once more.

Although by 2026 the mechanics of the Web are mostly second nature to us, we mostly use the internet as a platform for interactive applications - the Web as a ‘software interface’ as Jesse James Garrett described it in his classic Elements of User Experience diagram. But I’m much more interested in the other side of the coin - the Web as a hypertext system for navigating information.

When people think of the content of the web today, they think of 'websites' and 'webpages'. These sites and pages have addresses which are unique, so that when you type the address into your browser, you'll know where to expect to be directed to. On these websites and webpages, people can write about all sorts of things, any number of topics. And these topics can be repeatedly discussed on various different websites and pages.

What's missing is the links between these sites and pages. Usually, it takes a search via Google (other search engines are available, folks) to get a good example of this. You type in the topic that you're looking for, and the search engine will return all the pages it can find where the words that form that topic are mentioned. But there's no single webpage which represents the topic itself. If there was, and if it had its own, unique address, then everyone could, on their own websites, link to that 'topic' as a way of saying "This is exactly the thing I'm talking about.". If several people did this, their websites would be automatically linked together by the fact they share the same topic - rather than by the fact that someone has created a physical link between one page and another. The former makes more sense, and is much more useful in the long run. Indeed, if these 'topics' or 'concepts' had their own, unique, permanent addresses on the Internet, then the web would become not only a store of 'pages', but of 'concepts' which happen to have 'pages' related to them - not everything on the web would have to be a 'page'. Only things that were 'pages' (say, of a book...) would then be referred to as a page.

In Tom Coates’ seminal essay, The Age of Point-at-Things, he describes a future in which (and I’m paraphrasing here) social objects - the things that people are interested in, and are often the topic of conversations - are given persistent, addressable ‘handles’. Doing so would not only help people when referring to the same cultural thing - the ‘point-at-thing’ of the essay’s title - but these digital handles could also have additional information that describes the thing, available when requested. If then connected to handles for other social objects, we’d begin creating a network that represented the world around us (both physical and cultural), and be able to interact with it in ways we can’t today.

This wasn’t exclusively new thinking - this was something that has its’ roots in some of Sir Tim Berners-Lee’s ideas of a ‘semantic’ web. Despite many discussions and debates over the practicality, technical feasibility and value of achieving that particular dream, I still think the central idea - give ‘handles’ to things, connect them in ways that represent how we understand them to be connected in our minds, and make them ‘get at’ able via the mechanisms of the Web (URLs, hyperlinks, HTTP) - is hugely significant.

In the context of the BBC’s programme information platform, for instance, you might want to refer to a specific episode, a series overall, perhaps a particular music track you heard, or a recipe you saw being cooked. By creating addresses (i.e. URLs) for each programme that the BBC produces, with unique, persistent identifiers,people all over the world can use that ‘handle’ when discussing that particular programme, so everyone will know exactly what they are referring to.

In effect, therefore, although if you type in that address into your browser, you are presented with a 'page' about that programme, the address itself represents the programme, rather than the page about the programme. So far, so good - this is pretty much what has been implemented to date.

(Incidentally, this something that, in all the talk of AI and LLMs, is missing from that way of thinking about digital experiences. Yes, you can create interactive experiences, but each response is different, and it results in a lack of a shared cultural space. Perhaps we need both?)

And yet… To me, this is only half the picture. When I sit down to watch a TV drama, or if you look online at the discussions people are having about the shows they love, they’re not talking about the broadcast information. They care about the characters and the things that happen to them. These are just some of the ‘handles’ that matter.

Taking the same ideas that inspired the programme information platform into account, if we have unique URLs for each episode, each series, each brand, why not have a URL for each character within a programme, for each event that connects characters, for each place within the programme?

What’s more, let’s not just treat these as websites. If each story is a network of connected information, then we can query it, and interact with it programmatically - APIs, MCP, call it what you will. What if you could ask questions or run software that can parse structured data about narrative?

Just as if we make brands, series and episodes in effect the building blocks for ourselves and others to create all sorts of semantically interlinked websites on top of, if we were to give characters, events, places their own unique addresses, and make the information about these things machine readable, and accessible, we could mash them up to create sites (and new content) such as timelines from a particular character's point of view, follow story arcs etc.

I like to imagine that the ultimate would be something where every character, event and place in the fictional universe of a programme has an address - and then just like taking toy models of those things, we and the audience could make our own stories from them. You want to add your own characters to the mix? Sure, give them a unique address (for instance, in your own webspace), and start linking them to other characters, events etc.

One final point to bear in mind as a caution, however. Although essentially all this structure is a good thing, one thing we should be wary of is creating too much structure, and limiting what we can do with it. If we fix things down too much, saying that this is the 'official' version of a particular event, or background or character, in too rigid a way, this will limit creativity and stimulate only arguments about who's right or wrong. We want to give people the building blocks and toys to create new stories, but we don't want to restrict the stories they tell.

Arguably iPlayer could even be a part of this wider programme information platform (and in some ways it is). But, due to many historical/organisational reasons that aren’t really worth opening up here, we are where we are.

This essay is a reworked and expanded version of a piece I originally wrote in December 2008 - Content Modelling & Storytelling