Like many traditional broadcasters, the BBC uses the MOS Protocol, external for communications between newsroom computers and servers where media files such as audio and video are stored.
Production teams create running orders using OpenMedia, external, and every time they add details or make changes, MOS XML messages are emitted by the newsroom computer systems. We've created a way to process these messages to build up a machine-readable version of the running order.
We developed a general solution for dealing with MOS messages - a Python library called mosromgr. It's based on open standards and could be useful to other broadcasting organisations, so we've released it under an open source licence.
The library provides functionality for classifying MOS file types, processing and inspecting MOS message files, as well as merging MOS files into a running order, and providing a "complete" programme.
The source code is available on GitHub, external
The documentation for the library is available on readthedocs, external
The project is available from the Python Package Index, external
This library was developed by the BBC News Labs, external team as part of a series of projects based around extracting information from running orders from the BBC's TV and radio programmes, such as Slicer, external, Live Segment Notifications, external and Automated Chapters, external.