Applicability of SSM and UML for designing a search application for the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC)

Abstract

Whilst there are successful general web search engines such as Google that will find any piece of content, there is a perceived need for a specific search that makes better use of the internal knowledge the broadcasting industry (e.g. BBC) has about its own content. The British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) is a public service broadcaster funded by the licence fee paid by United Kingdom households. This industrybased case study looks at the applicability of Soft Systems Methodology (SSM) and Unified Modelling Language (UML) to design a hypothetical, high-level view of a search application that receives web content from a variety of BBC content production systems and makes every item then searchable by a BBC website visitor using the search feature. The developers of such search applications can benefit from this specific industrybased case study that contextualised the problem space using SSM and developed UML models to solve the problem. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2014.