The Moving Picture Experts Group

Media Value Chain Ontology

Standard: 
Part number: 
19
Activity status: 
Closed

MPEG-21 Media Value Chain Ontology (MVCO)

 

 

MPEG doc#: N11962
Date: March, 2011
Author:
 

1      Introduction

ISO/IEC 21000-19 MPEG Media Value Chain Ontology (MVCO) is an ontology formalizing the media value chain within the framework of ISO/IEC 21000. It is part 19 of MPEG.-21.

It specifies a machine readable ontology of the media value chain defining a minimal set of kinds of intellectual property, the roles of the users interacting with them, and the relevant actions regarding intellectual property among other features. The MVCO is designed to represent common aspects of content creation, distribution, use and handling.

2      Overview of the MVCO

The MVCO understands a media value chain as the process by which a work is conceived, represented, performed, fixated, distributed, or broadcast, and lastly consumed; acknowledging that different chains exist for different works, going through different transformations, being distributed through different channels and being consumed in different manners. The MVCO captures a base model for those different value chains, focusing on the processes relevant to intellectual property.

The ontology represents a minimum necessary model common to most markets and jurisdictions reflected in, for example, World International Intellectual Property Organization treaties; and in regards to any minor differences between different legislations, the MVCO is neutral.

ISO/IEC 21000-19 declares a normative OWL 1.0 ontology RDF/XML syntax to be used by MVCO enabled applications. MVCO enabled applications can derive software modules within the ISO/IEC 21000 framework based on this common model, handling ontology classes and instances, answering advanced queries and making use of the semantic power of the OWL language. MVCO enabled applications can import the MVCO ontology in extended ontologies adapted to the particular needs of the standard user while granting the logical consistency with the core model and facilitating the operation with third party applications.

MVCO also includes the definition of an API to facilitate the implementation of MVCO enabled applications, and provides examples of use in practical scenarios.

The main concepts in which the ontology is based includes IP Entities, Roles and Actions. Users and Permissions are also relevant concepts.

Figure 1 shows the main IP Entities and relating Actions in the IP value chain.

Figure 1 - Main IP Entities and Relating Actions in the IP Value Chain

Figure 2, in turn, shows the Roles and corresponding IP Entities along the value chain.

Figure 2 - Roles and corresponding IP Entities along the Value Chain

Finally, figure 3 shows the relations of Permissions with other MVCO elements.

Figure 3 - Relations of Permissions with other MVCO elements