Production Technology

Ontology for Media Creation

In order for the software that supports collaboration and automation in production workflows to interoperate, common data models and schemas for data exchange are needed. MovieLabs and its member studios developed its Ontology for Media Creation (OMC) to improve communication about workflows between people, organizations, and software. The OMC can serve as the underpinnings for that by providing consistent naming and definitions of terms, as well as ways to express how various concepts and components relate to one another in production workflows.

The number of things to be defined within something as complex as making a movie or series of episodic TV shows is extremely vast, and we cannot define them all out of the gate. However, there are a number of similarities between all productions and so we focus on those and expand out. For example, all productions have Participants that conduct Tasks often involving media Assets within

the realm of a workflow Context. By defining these key building blocks of Participants, Tasks, Assets and Contexts along with their relationships to each other, we can begin to design complex workflows which can be expressed in ways that both humans and machines can understand them.

The Ontology for Media Creation is part of a set of connected ontologies, which includes the Ontology for Media Distribution (OMD) and the Ontology for Creative Works. Note: These connected ontologies supersede the MovieLabs Creative Works Ontology (2018), which focused on data for distribution-related analytics.

The Ontology for Media Creation is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.