Automating workflows in media production: building an infrastructure for a service oriented architecture with a Business Process Management system

This paper describes our experiences with building an infrastructure for automating workflows in media production based on service oriented architecture (SOA). An SOA deals with distributed software services that interact with each other. By adopting an SOA in cooperation with a Business Process Management System (BPMS) we aimed at increased efficiency and control, shorter setup times, and increased flexibility. We used open source or free products where possible, and the end result is a professional architecture suitable for small-scale to medium-scale media enterprises. Key concepts are the use of JMS as messaging layer for asynchronous, long-running service interactions (which are typical in a media production environment), the orchestration of services leading to processes with more business meaning, the graphical description of these business processes followed by the automatic generation of executable code (BPEL), support for human interactions in the processes and compliance with the WS-I Basic Profile 1.1. Our architecture is illustrated with a use case in which we automated a process that deals with the intake, review, transcoding and publishing of user-generated content