Media in the Cloud:

Ontology and Semantic Web Technology Navigation Guide

This is a primer on the use of ontologies -- which provide the framework for the data held in knowledge graphs -- and other semantic web technologies within the media domain.

The current media landscape is characterized by movement of workflows into the cloud. This has brought with it expectations around automation, agility, and scalability; and challenges in areas such as interoperability, portability, discovery, and orchestration. It is an ever more data-driven eco-system with an increased need for consistent, interoperable, and actionable metadata and semantics to drive and manage distributed and cloud-based processes and workflows.

Fortunately, semantic technologies have great potential to address some of these issues, supporting the combination of standards-based machine-readability with the representation of human subject matter expertise. An array of mechanisms and specifications have emerged that make the utilization of semantic technologies in media workflows both more practical and more desirable, including microservices and application programming interfaces; artificial intelligence and machine learning; and media-specific ontology specifications from the European Broadcasting Union, MovieLabs, and the dwerft Linked Metadata for Media project.