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, announces what those nodes look like so they can be authored in the pipeline editor, 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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Writing a Custom Node — Add a node of your own and have it appear in the pipeline editor by itself, without changing or rebuilding Loom. See Writing a Custom Node.
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Examples — Custom node, custom daemon (Java) and custom worker (Python). See Examples.