Production Technology

Ontology for Media Creation

MovieLabs 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, its member studios and key industry contributors, have developed the MovieLabs Ontology for Media Creation (OMC) to improve communication about workflows between people, organizations, and software. The OMC is an ongoing and ever-expanding project that serve as the industry software foundation 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.

Learn more about the Ontology for Media Creation

Read our Blog Series “From Script to Data” to see how the MovieLabs Ontology for Media Creation can be used in actual workflows to breakdown scripts and expose Narrative and Production information to downstream applications.

From Script to Data – Part 1

From Script to Data – Part 2

From Script to Data – Part 3

Movielabs fireside chat video series

Bonus Episode: Security

Check out the MovieLabs Audio and Video Podcast and see what industry leaders think about CSAP and MovieLab’s Zero Trust approach to production security.

Version and Release Information

The MovieLabs Ontology for Media Creation was updated to Version 2.6 in December 2024 which included extensions to support Audio Workflows and CG Assets. In 2025 we expect a minor and major release which will further expand the OMC, follow us on LinkedIn to find out more.

MovieLabs releases both an RDF and JSON schemas to support OMC. Developers should visit the MovieLabs Documentation Site and GitHub Repo to find out more about how to implement solutions using OMC.

To help developers MovieLabs has also released a new OMC-JSON Validator tool which will be updated with subsequent releases to check JSON implementations of OMC and provide useful errors and suggestions for improving code and compliance with the ontology,

MovieLabs does not expand the Ontology in a vacuum but relies on members of the MovieLabs Industry Forum, specialist contributors and the work of other industry bodies including SMPTE, VES, ASC and the Alliance for OpenUSD.

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. MovieLabs OMC is also closely related to the MovieLabs Visual Language which provides standardized ways to graphically represent OMC concepts as well as a libary of icons for concepts in the MovieLabs common Vocabulary.

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

Yamdu in the 2030 Spotlight

The Ontology for Media Creation is delivering value now, streamlining interoperability between applications. See how Yamdu is transforming pre-production and using the MovieLabs Ontology for Media Creation for data interchange.

See the Case Study