The great thing about the BBC is that you can be pretty sure that there;’s a team of people working behind the scenes on new and clever ways of doing things with content and online data.

I found a link to a project called DATA ART – a partnership between BBC Learning, the Arts and Humanities Research Council and the University of Westminster.

You can find details of some of their projects here:

I’ve not yet delved into all of them yet, (writing this on the train on my non Flash-friendly iPhone). But there could be some interesting possibilities with one of these projects – Flared Music.

The site notes that “Flared music lets you visually research relationships between musicians and bands using the Musicbrainz database an online community resource that the BBC is working with to collate music information”. Enter the name of an artist or producer and let the app search out connections and collaborations.

I entered “Paul McCartney” and it listed collaborations from the obvious (Michael Jackson, Stevie Wonder and of course The Beatles) but also, bizarrely , a connection to Su Pollard. Ok – she was on Ferry Aid! But, it set me thinking – maybe it could be a starting point for a musical feature on the radio? Or the basis of a fun online game?

Take a look – try it for yourself – and see what strange connections it throws up.

And thanks to @backflipltd for flagging this project up.