Technical documentation
The Open Workflow Graph
A portable, vendor-neutral way to describe a media production workflow as data — precise enough that an engine can execute it and a query can audit it afterwards. Built on MovieLabs' Ontology for Media Creation.
Specification v0.92 — draft
OWG is an open specification published by Entertainment Technologists Inc., not a ratified industry standard. Pin the schema you validate against; Versioning and stability sets out how much movement to expect where, and Implementation considerations covers the decisions left to you.
v0.93 is published for review: cross-organization agents over A2A, IPTC labels on assets, and version 1.1 of the generative-AI profile. See the changelog.
Introduction
Overview
What the Open Workflow Graph is, the problem it solves, and how it relates to the standards already in your pipeline.
Quickstart
Write a valid OWG document, validate it, and understand what the graph now knows — in about ten minutes.
Core concepts
The five node types, the provenance backbone beneath them, and the two design choices that make a workflow both a plan and a record.
Agentic workflows and certainty
What changes when workflows are written by machines rather than people, the four things you must be able to establish about a workflow before running it, and how OWG makes each of them checkable.
Specification
Document structure
The OWG v0.92 document — every top-level field, the entity registries, parameters, and governance ceilings.
Tasks and executors
The task object in full — executors, provenance edges, dependencies, failure and compensation, retry, gates and re-routes.
Assets and versioning
Asset identity, storage locators, the five typed version relations, lifecycle states, and how composition and external identifiers ride along.
Participants and authority
How humans, agents, and services are declared, and how an agent's authority chains to a responsible human.
Relationships and assurance
Explicit edges, the three assurance levels, and exactly where a machine proposal's confidence score and method live in the payload.
Subgraphs and turnovers
How a task nests an interior graph, and how that same mechanism scopes a cross-company hand-off to exactly what a vendor needs.
Reference syntax
The formal grammar for $. references, string interpolation, and when expressions — with the run-state vocabulary they evaluate against.
Profiles
How profiles declare the executors, tool vocabularies, and registry extensions a workflow may use, keeping domain and vendor detail out of the core specification.
Run records
The run document — how one execution of a definition is recorded, with per-attempt status, cost, and the actual infrastructure used.
Implementing
Validation
Every check the validator performs — structural, referential, graph, and expression — and the error codes it emits.
Conformance corpus
The reference workflows, what each tier proves, how the regression harness runs them, and the true inventory.
Persistence requirements
What an implementation must be able to answer about an OWG graph — stated as required capabilities, not as a prescribed storage design.
For agents
A machine-oriented implementation guide — canonical endpoints, the minimum viable document, a pre-flight checklist, and what an agent-authored workflow must satisfy to be trusted.
Examples
Complete annotated workflows from the conformance corpus — atomic, generative, linear chain, and conditional with a human gate.
Implementation considerations
Decisions the specification deliberately leaves to implementers, with recommended approaches and the trade-offs behind them.
Failure-handling best practices
Four ways a task's failure can behave, when to reach for each one, and how they compose with fan-out and conditional merges.
Bindings
EIDR
How OWG carries EIDR Title and Edit IDs on assets, and models registration as a task against the registry.
IMF
How OWG governs an IMF package as one asset, with its track files related by edges and its validation as a gate before delivery.
OpenTrackIO
How OWG records camera and lens tracking for a take as a governed asset, while the live stream stays outside the graph.
MDDF Avails
How OWG governs an MDDF Avails document and Media Manifest as assets tied to the edit they describe, with validation and approval as tasks.
Rights and clearance
A draft proposal for carrying ownership, licensing and clearance on a live production graph, built on ODRL and the distribution vocabulary already in the MovieLabs family.
A2A
How OWG hands a task to another organization's agent over the Agent2Agent protocol, and keeps the meaning, the authority and the record that the protocol leaves out.
C2PA
How OWG records C2PA content credentials on assets, maps manifests and ingredients onto lineage, and earns the attested assurance level only after verification.
ComfyUI
How a ComfyUI run is recorded in OWG. One generative task whose interior is the executed graph, the models and media it used as assets, and an output labeled in IPTC terms.
IPTC
How OWG labels how an asset came to be, using IPTC's Digital Source Type vocabulary and AI properties, so the record reads the same in C2PA and in image and video metadata.
Ecosystem
Standards bindings
How OWG references OpenUSD, BBC TAMS, OpenTimelineIO, C2PA, SOM, and OMC without absorbing their internals — and the field-level hooks each binding uses.
Security model
Why permissioning is a property of the graph rather than a system wrapped around it — and how scope- and time-bounded access falls out of the schema.
AI disclosure and compliance
How EU AI Act Article 50 disclosure becomes a lineage query, and the six schema fields that make a per-asset disclosure manifest computable.
Versioning and stability
What v0.92 defines, how the specification versions, where it deliberately leaves room to extend, and what that means for building against it.
Changelog
What changed in each version of the specification, and when.
Articles
When agents cross company lines
A2A lets one company's agent hand work to another's. Why the record has to travel with the work, and the three small additions in OWG v0.93 that make it do so.
Recording a ComfyUI run
ComfyUI already saves the exact graph behind every image it makes. How OWG carries that into the production record, labels it in IPTC terms, and what two test runs showed a record has to get right.
Machine-readable
This documentation is written to be implemented by agents as well as read by people. Every page is available as raw markdown.
- /llms.txt — index for LLMs
- /llms-full.txt — every page in one file
- /raw/<slug>.md — any page as markdown