Tracking Jobs from Servers and Workflow Applications in Media Production.

The paper analyses the possibilites and alternatives to track servers, control systems and workflow software used in media production. In the existing systems for global PMS (production management) the collection of the time and event data from the production chain is normally quite laborious. Data senders, in object formats, parsing, databases and powerful software are needed to track, parse, save and re-port job flow and process behaviour. In our proposed solutions we prefer tracking servers automatically with no permanent data sender modules. Distributed components and object brokers (Java, CORBA) include many useful generic concepts. To keep the PMS overhead and costs on a reasonable level and without sacrificing the scaleability these technologies offer interoperability, persistence and open-system configuration methods. Metadata architectures are standardised under 3W consortium, including resource description (RDF) and markup (XML). This means that the media structures and documents become self-describing and carry their structure andd semantics to any later users, up to the end-users. It is self-evident that any production management becomes easier due to more efficient metadata and well-defined workflow.