MSRBot.io

Automated cross-publisher standards index built and maintained by Steve LLamb

Why It Exists

MSRBot.io is a live, automated (and hand curated) Media Standards Registry (MSR) of media technology documents — extracting, validating, and linking documents across SMPTE, ISO, ITU, AES and other many other publishers, SDOs, and industry groups.

MSRBot.io began in 2020 as a response to a long-standing gap in how the media and entertainment industry tracks its own standards, best practices, specifications, and other important documents and publications - and the references contained within. Understanding the tangled tree branches and roots of documents' dependencies due to the nature of nested references (sometimes circular, and often cross-org), was required for regular maintanance of these critically important documents.

Documents from SMPTE, ISO, ITU, AES and others have always been interconnected — yet their references lived scattered across the internet as generated or scanned PDFs, HTML pages, TXT files, sometimes hidden behind paywalls, or trapped in inconsistent formats. MSRBot.io was built to solve that: an open, automated registry that maps those relationships, extracts structured metadata, and preserves a living history of the standards ecosystem.

What started as a personal tool to make sense of reference trees has grown into a self-maintaining system that reveals the lineage, dependencies, and context of the world’s media technology documents

See docs/changelog.md for details on updates since Q2 2025.

Live Stats

All badges are generated from live JSON at api/stats.json.

Details

• Historical range: 1896 → present
• Automation uptime: 100% since August 2025 (SMPTE)
• Publishers covered: SMPTE, NIST, ISO, ITU, AES, and more

Key Artifacts

• Core data stored as JSON: src/main/data
• Schema for data: src/main/schemas
• Main document Dataset: documents.json
• Document lineages: Master Suite Index (MSI)
• Document reference maps: Master Reference Index (MRI)
• Live API Stats api/stats.json
• Public Site generated from main at https://msrbot.io

Automation Overview

MSRBot.io updates itself through a chain of automated GitHub Actions. When appropriate, PRs generate MSR Build Preview review links.

See docs/samples.md for full workflow details and live run sample links.

Stage	Purpose	Trigger	Key Output
Extract	Pulls and parses SMPTE HTML/PDF metadata	Weekly	documents.json
MSI	Builds document lineages	PR Merge/Weekly	masterSuiteIndex.json
MRI	Maps references across all docs	After MSI	masterReferenceIndex.json
MSR	Builds and publishes the site	After MRI	https://msrbot.io/
URL Validate	Checks and normalizes links	After MSR	url_validate_audit.json
PR Build Preview	Builds MSR preview prior to publication	PR Creation (Extract/MSI/MRI/Site PRs)	https://msrbot.io/pr/###/

%%{init: {'flowchart': {'curve': 'linear'}}}%%
graph LR
  subgraph Pipeline
    direction LR
    A[Extract] --> B[MSI] --> C[MRI] --> D[MSR] --> E[URL Validate]
  end

  A -.-> P[PR Build Preview]
  B -.-> P
  C -.-> P
  S[Site/Template PR] -.-> P

Loading

Dotted lines indicate PR-triggered preview builds. Extract, MSI, MRI, and site/template PRs all generate a preview.

Development

Requires Node 20 + npm.
Run scripts with:

npm run extract
npm run build-msi
npm run build-mri
npm run validate-urls
npm run normalize-urls
npm run canonicalize
npm run validate
npm run build

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Contributing

Issues and pull requests are welcome.
For questions or collaboration inquiries, contact Steve LLamb.

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Data Disclaimer

MSRBot.io aggregates factual metadata and references via https://github.com/PrZ3r/MSRBot.io/ about publicly released standards, best practices, and other documents (e.g., SMPTE, ISO, ITU, AES, and many others).

All metadata is derived from publicly available information and is provided for research and interoperability purposes only. Original standards and other documents remain the intellectual property and copyright of their respective publishers, as applicable.