Alliance project core technology

The dwerft is researching the Linked Media Data Cloud (LMDC). The cloud shall offer all software solutions in film and TV a transparent solution of give-and-take, instead of singular APIs among the single software solutions. This way each software does not any more have to learn the language of another software in order to communicate with it, it just learns one further language – the one of the the LMDC.

Use of production metadata in the distribution as a business model
The collected metadata during the production process of a film is provided automatically to the multi platform distribution, in a way that various user groups (producer, distributor, marketing) may use it. That for the complete sub-area of the distribution gets integrated in the technological platform LMDC – with all players, technologies and expectations of qualitative and quantative kind. In the end also metadata out of the viewers’ response of the contents get analysed and mapped on the core technology in order to close the value creation circuit and provide new productions with a data basis for a successful distribution.

Research and laboratory implementation of the technology platform as a semantically supported end-to-end system solution

With the technology platform LMDC application tools from all areas of the value chain can be dynamically integrated. The goal is to achieve interoperability with x formats and systems as well as a modular adaptability to market dynamics.

The cross-linked metadata is subjected to a model development and the qualification in order to make it usable in the distribution. The LMDC consists of the components
1. Digital Media Ontology (DMO) as a common language model
2. semantically supported database (Triple Store)
3. Abstraction layers to systems and services
4. generic function adapters for individual systems
5. Metadata converter, access manager, versioning, checking and analysis

Visualization and use of metadata in practice (LMDC services)

The intelligent use of metadata for the distribution is possible if it becomes visible to different user groups in the distribution (producer, distributor, marketing). This is done via the LMDC service DATA TRACKER, which allows access to all metadata at all times. In addition, we are counting on the development that apart from the actual film content (supplied as a digital data container), a metadata container (as a second asset) must be supplied to distributors.

For this purpose, the LMDC service METADATA MASTERING TOOL (MMT) is being developed, with which these metadata containers are automatically stored, versioned, processed, tested and evaluated according to the various technical guidelines.
By pressing a button on the respective distributor (e.g., ARD, BBC, Netflix).

All metadata generated in the production workflow is structurally transferred to Digital Media Ontology (DMO) and stored in a semantically supported database (TripleStore). One level above the TripleStore is the abstraction layer component.

This is the sum of all communications between all data-aware system solutions and is a kind of interface with which the LMDC backend can communicate with any user system, regardless of the manufacturer.

Of course, this also applies to the sub-technologies and external data sources to be developed in dwerft-2, and they too are linked via the abstraction layer.
Within the abstraction layer and the dwerft-2 TripleStore, Digital Media Ontology is used as a common language model. In order to establish interoperability with external data sources and system solutions, as well as the automated enrichment by means of knowledge databases such. Allowing DBPedia or Wikidata, the DMO will be at the elemental level to other external ontologies such as EBUCore, DBPedia, BBC, etc. networked.

In order to make the heterogeneous system landscape of the media-producing world meaningfully interconnectable and usable, both a versioning solution and intelligent access management are required. Versioning ensures that all (meta) data records can always be accessed at an older or newer level and that it is understandable which system or user last changed a metadata.

Access management means that not every user in connection with any system can override any data unless they have the appropriate rights, and at the same time, determine which data they are allowed to read. Both components are part of the abstraction layer and are configured individually for each system landscape.