From an internal perspective
Yes! seperate out Series, Episode numbers and Ep Titles into clear fields. It's really useful if you were to use TV anytime data to populate programme support sites like, say, bbc.co.uk/buffy or /theoffice - and becomes really important for following ongoing series. It's something that the Radio Times do in a very patchy way.
TV-Anytime can represent episode numbers using the EpisodeOf tag:
e.g.
<EpisodeOf index='2'/>
would denote the second episode in a series. The problem however is that although this information is available within the BBC, it's not provided in the data stream I use to generate the TV-Anytime files, with the exception of BBC7, who put this information at the end of the synopsis. This data source was intended for the generation of EPG guides - TV-Anytime on the other hand has a much bigger remit. We enhance the basic guide data with as much information as possible to provide the TV-Anytime data - but if we're not provided with the information in the first place, there's only so much that I can do!
You could, for instance, make a query engine that lets you build a personal schedule around watching a show in story order across all the various channels and repeats....
That's exactly what the tag is meant for - to ensure the order of a series is maintained by an automated recording/displaying service.
Hywel - Sent via the backstage.bbc.co.uk discussion group. To unsubscribe, please visit http://backstage.bbc.co.uk/archives/2005/01/mailing_list.html. Unofficial list archive: http://www.mail-archive.com/backstage@lists.bbc.co.uk/
