MetaLoom // Cortex is the media processing engine of the MetaLoom platform. It analyses media files — images, videos, audio, documents — and extracts metadata such as hashes, thumbnails, fingerprints, face embeddings, transcripts, captions and OCR text.
Cortex is a Daemon that Serves Nodes
Cortex runs as a long-running worker daemon, not a one-shot CLI batch tool. On startup it opens a persistent WebSocket to a Loom server, registers itself and the node kinds it can run, and then waits for work. Loom pushes tasks down that connection; Cortex never polls.
Crucially, the pipeline graph lives on Loom, not on Cortex. Loom owns the DAG and dispatches individual tasks — a source task to enumerate media, then one node task per graph node per item — to whichever registered Cortex instance is allowed to run that kind. Cortex only ever sees one node (or affinity segment) at a time and answers with a result. See Pipeline Mechanism and Operation.
This lets you scale processing horizontally: run many Cortex instances, each advertising a subset of
node kinds (e.g. a GPU box that only runs facedetect and whisper), and Loom routes tasks
accordingly.
Components
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Pipeline Nodes — The built-in processing nodes and what they extract. See Nodes.
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Configuration — Environment variables and settings. See Configuration.
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Monitoring API — Health and readiness endpoints. See Monitoring API.
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Metrics — The Prometheus scrape endpoint and the
cortex_*catalog. See Metrics. -
Artifacts — Maven coordinates and the container image. See Artifacts.
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Examples — Custom node, custom daemon (Java) and custom worker (Python). See Examples.