Canonical Processes of Media Production

Creating compelling multimedia presentations is a complex task. It involves the capture of media assets, then editing and authoring these into one or more final presentations. Tools tend to concentrate on a single aspect of media production to reduce the complexity of the interface and to tailor support to a specific task. While these tools are suited to the task they are designed for, very often there is no consideration for input requirements for the next tool down the line. Each tool in the multimedia production chain has the potential for adding semantic annotations to the media asset at hand, describing relevant aspects of the asset and why it is being used for a particular purpose. These annotations need to be included in the information handed over to the next tool in the production chain. We specify inputs and outputs to a number of canonical processes we identify in multimedia production. We do not specify the intricate workings of the processes, but concentrate on the information flow between them. To validate our model we describe a number of workflows in terms of the processes and specify the inputs and outputs. Our claim is that by specifying explicitly the input and output required for processes that occur in widely differing uses of media we can provide the tool-building community with a small set of building blocks that can be supported for semantically aware media production tools.