EIDR

The Entertainment Identifier Registry, or EIDR, is a global unique identifier system for a broad array of audiovisual objects, including motion pictures, television, and radio programs. The identification system resolves an identifier to a metadata record that is associated with top-level titles, edits, DVDs, encodings, clips, and mashups. EIDR also provides identifiers for video service providers, such as broadcast and cable networks.

As of June 2020, EIDR contains over two million records, including almost 400 thousand movies and almost one million episodes from over 40,000 TV series.

EIDR is an implementation of a digital object identifier (DOI).

History

Media asset identification systems have existed for decades. The common motivation for their creation is to enable the management of media assets through the assignment of a unique id to a set of metadata representing salient characteristics of each asset. Over time such systems tend to proliferate, with each arising to deal with a specific set of issues. As a result, there is considerable variation between systems in terms of which assets are categorized, which metadata is associated with each asset, and the very definition of an asset. To name a few examples, should a "director's cut" of a film be distinct from the original theatrical release? How should regional variations (e.g. translation of the title or dialog into foreign languages) be accounted for? Further complications include the procedures (and required credentials) for adding new assets, editing existing assets, and creating derivative assets.

EIDR was created to address these issues, as well as others encountered in video asset workflows, both in a business-to-business context and the intramural post-production activities of content producers. EIDR has the following characteristics: A central registry available to all participants Ability to easily register new assets An asset ID that is immutable (and in particular with respect to changes in asset ownership or location of the metadata or the asset itself) Detection/prevention of duplicates of the same asset being created Ability to create a set of video assets derived from an abstract work (e.g. original theatrical release, director's cut, language variants) Ability to group video assets by more general relationships (e.g. episodes of a season of a TV series) A core set of metadata to differentiate assets, even when closely related Scalable, immutable, persistent

EIDR is intended to supplement, not replace, existing asset identification systems. To the contrary, a key feature is to allow an EIDR record to include references to that asset's ID under other systems. This feature is particularly useful for film and television archives, making it easy for them to cross-reference their holdings with other sources for the work and metadata about it. By design, EIDR does not replicate features of other asset ID systems, e.g. commercial systems that seek to add value through enhanced metadata (e.g. plot summaries, production details). It is also a non-goal to track ownership and rights information, which can, however, be implemented as applications that use the EIDR ID.

Content model

EIDR is built on a collection of records (which are further sub-divided into fields) that are stored in a central registry. These records are referenced externally by DOIs, which are assigned when a record is created, and each identifier is immutable thereafter. The identifier resolution system underlying DOIs is the Handle System and so each native EIDR Content ID is a handle formatted, in increasing specificity, to handle, DOI and EIDR standards.

Content ID format

The canonical form of an EIDR Content ID is an instance of a handle and has the format:

10.5240/XXXX-XXXX-XXXX-XXXX-XXXX-C where 10.5240 is the DOI prefix for an EIDR asset. The "10" indicates the handle is a DOI; other prefixes are assigned to other asset types (e.g. academic publications). The digits between the "." and "/" form the sub-prefix, which indicates which registration agency within the International DOI Foundation (IDF) has rights to manage these handles. "5240" is assigned to the EIDR Association. XXXX-XXXX-XXXX-XXXX-XXXX-C is the DOI suffix. Each "X" denotes a hexadecimal digit (A-F), and "C" is an ISO 7064 Mod 37,36ISO/IEC 7064:2003: Information technology -- Security techniques -- Check character systems. 2002 check digit. There is also a 96-bit compact binary form that is intended for embedding in small payloads such as watermarks. This form is generated from the canonical format as follows: 16-bit sub-prefix: generated by interpreting the sub-prefix as a binary value, e.g. B'0001010001111000' 80-bit suffix: the non-checksum part of the suffix, represented as 10 bytes The Uniform Resource Name form for an EIDR ID is specified in .

For use on the web an EIDR content ID can be represented as a URI in one of these forms: https://doi.org/10.5240/XXXX-XXXX-XXXX-XXXX-XXXX-C: this is an EIDR ID represented as a DOI proxy reference (it will be redirected from DOI to the EIDR registry) info: [deprecated]: this is an EIDR ID represented as an RFC 4452 compliant "info" URI (remembering that all EIDR IDs are also DOI IDs, but not the converse).

Record types

There are four types of content records, each associated with a reserved prefix: Content ID (10.5240/XXXX-XXXX-XXXX-XXXX-XXXX-C): is associated with an entertainment asset such as a movie or TV series. Content records are hierarchical, allowing relationships to be expressed such as a Series, whose children would be Seasons, whose children in turn would be individual episodes. Many other relationships are supported, as described below. Content records form the bulk of the data in the EIDR registry. Party ID (10.5237/XXXX-XXXX): identifies entities such as registrants, content producers, and distributors. Video Service ID (10.5239/XXXX-XXXX): Identifies a video service, colloquially known as a "channel" or "network": a (usually) linear sequence of content scheduled to be broadcast at specified times (e.g. the Service ID for the Cartoon Network is 10.5239/8BE5-E3F6). Video services are hierarchical: for example, a parent may have several children to account for regional or language variations). User ID (10.5238/[0-9a-zA-Z_.#()]{2-32}): Identifies a user using a string of 2–32 alphanumeric and selected special characters (illustrated here with Perl syntax). A User is primarily an administrative concept that is subordinate to Parties (from whom they inherit access rights). Unlike the other EIDR DOIs, the User ID can only be used within EIDR (e.g. programming APIs).

The sub-prefixes 5237, 5238, 5239, and 5240 are all assigned to the EIDR Association.

Content Records

Content records are objects categorized by their types and relationships. Each has three different (orthogonal) kinds of type: Object Type: there are a total of 10 of these. First is the Basic Type, which has the minimal fields necessary to describe a content record. The other 9 are derived from the basic type, and contain extra fields for describing more complex objects. Structural Type: these distinguish representations of a work and are listed in increasing order of specificity: Abstraction: Used for objects having no reality, such as a series container or the most basic concept of the original work. This corresponds to the International Standard Musical Work Code (ISWC) for musical works, the International Standard Text Code (ISTC) for textual works, or the International Standard Audiovisual Number (ISAN) for audiovisual works. Performance: Used for items that are particular versions of a work, such as the original theatrical release or director's cut of a film or a locally censored version of a TV show. This roughly corresponds to the International Standard Recording Code (ISRC) for musical works and to some uses of the Version ISAN (V-ISAN) for audiovisual works. Digital: A particular digital representation of a work, such as an MPEG-2 encoding of a movie. This corresponds to some uses of the V-ISAN. Referent Type: the type of the content asset, independent of a particular manifestation (e.g. a movie shown on TV is still a movie): Series: An Abstraction that contains ordered or unordered individual items. Season: A second level of grouping below a Series, usually covering a time interval TV: Content that first appeared via broadcast. Movie: Long-form content that first appeared in a cinema or theater. Short: Loosely defined to cover a work that is 40 minutes or less, such as music videos, theatrical newsreels, or theatrical or DTV cartoon shorts. Web: Content that first appeared on the Web. This is different from content from elsewhere that has been made available on the Web. Interactive Material: Content that is not strictly audio-visual. It covers DVD menus, interactive TV overlays, customized players, etc. Compilation: Content composed of multiple other assets that cannot be more precisely described, such as a box set of a film franchise. Supplemental: This type is for secondary content whose primary purpose is to support, augment, or promote other content. Examples include trailers, outtakes, and promotion documentaries ("making of" pieces).

Basic metadata

The following fields (taken from a larger set) comprise the base object data of a content record: Structural Type: e.g. Abstraction Mode: e.g. AudioVisual (for a movie or TV program); "Audio" for a radio program; "Visual" for a silent work. Referent Type: e.g. Movie Title: the primary title. Titles and Alternate Titles are further distinguished by: Lang: the language of the title expressed as ISO 639-1 code Class: release or regional Alternate Title 1..N: one or more alternate titles (often regional or language variants) Original Language: the language of the original release expressed as ISO 639-1 code Associated Org 1..N: Party ID(s) of producer, studio, etc. Release Date: date title was originally released Country of Origin: ISO 3166-1 alpha 2 code, with extensions for defunct countries Approximate Length: expressed as XML Schema xs:durationW3C XML Schema Part 2: Datatypes Second Edition datatype Alternate ID 1..N: one or more equivalent IDs expressed in a different asset ID system (see discussion below). Credits: only skeletal credits are provided, typically restricted to the director and up to four of the main actors. As noted, it is a non-goal for EIDR to compete with proprietary systems with rich metadata (e.g. plot summaries). The main goal is to assist with disambiguating the title, and helping with validation and de-duplication efforts. Registrant: the party that created this content record (e.g. "10.5237/superparty") Creation Date: date this content record was created Status: normally "valid" (there are special cases for deleted records) Last Modification Date: last time this content record was changed

Deleted content records An EIDR ID must be always resolvable, thus under normal circumstances the corresponding Content Record will be permanent. There are two mechanisms available to deal with errors or other unusual circumstances. The preferred one is aliasing, whereby an EIDR ID is transparently redirected to another content record. Aliasing is commonly employed to deal with an asset being registered twice.

The other mechanism is the use of tombstone records. This is employed when the Content Record is corrupted, or an otherwise invalid asset was accidentally registered. In this case the ID will be aliased to a special tombstone record. The tombstone can be recognized by applications because its EIDR ID field will be set to the distinguished value "10.5240/0000-0000-0000-0000-0000-X". Note that "X" means the 24th letter of the Latin alphabet (ASCII 0x58 or Unicode U+0058).

Alternate ID