Last week saw the long-awaited launch of the BBC Programme Catalogue, an online database of many thousands of TV and radio programmes the BBC has transmitted over the years. Included with each programme, where available, is details of contributors, related series data, frequency graphs and so on, all backed up with feeds everywhere.

What I particularly like about the catalogue is that pretty much every valuable data point is linked and referenced to related data. The potential for discoverability is huge. You could literally just read and follow links all day without hitting a dead end. It’s immense, and immensely useful.

Discoverability like this is a key feature of a lot of modern web applications. Take poster child Flickr as an example. Even though the principal content item itself (a photograph) is pretty much a dead-end, the metadata around each photo affords huge opportunity for discovering new and related data. The tags (local and global), photo sets, group pools and even the streams linked from each individual’s comments offer opportunities to browse onward and discover new things. Upcoming.org offers similar opportunities through friends’ events, groups and metros.

However, these examples have something that the BBC Programme Catalogue lacks at the moment:- jumping off points. When faced with such a huge body of data, it’s difficult to know where to start. Flickr has (amongst others) its Friends page, listing the latest photos from your friends and contacts. Not many friends on Flickr? Then there’s the whole Explore system. Upcoming.org has Events in My Metros and Friends’ Events to offer the opportunity to explore either what’s going on near you or what your friends are up to. Even oddities like LinkedIn have links to the social networks of those in your own social network so you can start exploring outwards.

At present, the BBC Programme Catalogue has just a search box. It might as well be asking me to key in what I ate for dinner last Tuesday, because my mind just goes blank and I don’t know where to start. Too much choice, and no options proffered. No jumping off points. Of course, it’s far more important that this database exists, is so easily searchable and affords massive discovery once you’re in there, all of which it presently does. The icing on the cake for me would be a jumping off page offering some basic stats, perhaps most viewed entries, popular searches, longest running series, recent entries, etc. Just some basics to help users start the discovery process.

However, this isn’t particularly about the BBC Programme Catalogue – which I think is excellent – that just happens to be a recent example. The general point is that it’s good to help users get started with what might be otherwise overwhelmingly large data sets. Help them dip their toes in the water by offering some common jumping off points. Otherwise not knowing where to start could be enough to put them off completely.