A BBC Programme Identifier (PID) is an alphanumeric, persistent, unique identifier for a television or radio programme brand, a season or series, or an individual episode, used by the

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in their web URLs, iPlayer viewers, and internal databases. – This source incorrectly expands the acronym as "Packet Identification number". A PID consists of a lower-case letter, followed by seven or more other characters which may be lower-case letters, or digits. Vowels (a, e, i, o, u) are not used, so that offensive words cannot be generated inadvertently. If the PID begins with the letter "b", this means the content reference identifier (CRID) authority is Red Bee; an opening "p" means that the authority is the BBC's Programme Information Pages (PIPs) database. An "s" is used internally, for PIDs identifying partners and suppliers. Other sources, denoted by different opening letters, could potentially be introduced. For example, the PID for the radio series '' The Life Scientific'' is b015sqc7 and the PID for the individual episode of that show first broadcast on 8 July 2014 is b048l0g3 which is used in its URL. Every programme ever broadcast by the BBC has its own web page on the BBC Programmes website (https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes), and the unique PID associated with the programme appears at the end of its web page URL, e.g. https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b04bzv2m PIDs have been created retrospectively for some programmes from the pre-digital era. An example, in the "p" range, is the PID for the 1956 '' Desert Island Discs'' episode featuring Ada Cherry Kearton, p009y95q. Most PIDs have eight characters, but some past World Service programmes have been given eleven-character PIDs, starting with "w"; an example is wcr5dr3dnl3. The BBC encourages viewers and listeners to machine tag media relating to programmes, on social sites such as

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and their own blog posts, using the relevant PID, in the format bbc:programme=b048l0g3. PIDs are also used to identify BBC programmes in Wikidata.

References

External links

{{Wikidata property, P827
Description of use of PIDs in linked data

Article on the development of PIDs

2004 post explaining thinking behind BBC URL structure

BBC Programmes and Music on the Linking Open Data Cloud
- 2008 Presentation on SlideShare by Patrick Sinclair, Content Producer at the BBC
Linked Data on the BBC
- 2009 Presentation on SlideShare by Patrick Sinclair, Content Producer at the BBC BBC Identifiers