Canonical processes of semantically annotated media production

While many multimedia systems allow the association of semantic annotations with media assets, there is no agreed-upon way of sharing these among systems. As an initial step within the multimedia community, we identify a small number of fundamental processes of media production, which we term canonical processes. We specify their inputs and outputs, but deliberately do not specify their inner workings, concentrating rather on the information flow between them. We thus identify a small set of building blocks that can be supported in semantically aware media production tools. The processes are identified in conjunction with a number of different research groups within the community who supply, in the companion papers, descriptions of existing systems and a mapping to them. We give a basic formalisation of the processes and discuss how this fits with other formalisation endeavours. We present a number of frequently asked questions during the development of the model and this special issue.