[HN Gopher] MovieLabs publishes common ontology for production
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MovieLabs publishes common ontology for production
Author : bryanrasmussen
Score : 88 points
Date : 2021-09-30 06:21 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.ibc.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.ibc.org)
| alvarlagerlof wrote:
| Eli5?
| InitialLastName wrote:
| The movie and film production process currently involves a
| large web of organizations, including both traditional movie
| production studios and software development firms. These firms
| have to be able to communicate effectively and work together,
| so they need a common language that they can use to describe
| concepts.
|
| Since (to paraphrase) the second hardest thing about software
| development is naming things, and software
| developers/filmmakers are likely to be unfamiliar with the
| other field's terminology, this guide is an attempt to provide
| suggested names of things such that everyone understands one
| another.
| karaterobot wrote:
| An ontology describes the things in a system and the
| relationships between them.
|
| By relationships, I don't just mean _A is related in some way
| to B_ , I mean (for example) _A modifies B_ , or _A requires B_
| , or even _A eats lunch with B_. In short, they relate things
| to each other using whatever the verbs in that domain are.
| Imagine a database schema, but with richer information.
|
| In theory, if you have a good ontology, you can translate an
| expert human's understanding of a system to something a
| computer can also understand. So if, for example, you were
| going to write software to orchestrate the production of a
| massive film, or a commercial production studio, you might
| benefit from a common ontology for film production.
|
| In practice, ontologies in the wild have had limited success,
| historically, compared to expectations in the academic world
| around the end of the last century.
| ok123456 wrote:
| Are there any real success stories for "ontolgies" like this? It
| seems like a lot of them are made, but they're ultimately not
| that useful.
|
| I've been forced to use some, and it seems that someone got paid
| a lot of money to come up with something that's incomplete and
| poorly models the domain. So the net change is some XML doodads
| that no one really wanted or needed.
| andyjohnson0 wrote:
| > Are there any real success stories for "ontolgies" like this?
| It seems like a lot of them are made, but they're ultimately
| not that useful.
|
| Back in the dot-com era I was marginally involved in a project
| proposal for a business spun-out of a logistics company. They
| had developed an ontology that supposedly captured their parent
| business's (admittedly extensive) knowledge of global
| logistics, and had then built a multi-layered process model on
| top of it. From what I recall, the business model was that you
| could buy vertical (logistics speciality) and horizontal (level
| of detail) slices through the model that would express a subset
| of the domain knowledge in a way that could be somehow
| implemented (or executed?). It seemed very clever, as did the
| people, and the one time I went to their offices the walls were
| pretty-much covered in diagrams and post-its defining their
| massive model. I heard later that they had shut-down due to
| lack of sales.
| kbenson wrote:
| Sometimes it's hard to know if a business failed because the
| idea was bad, the market wasn't ready, they didn't execute
| well, they didn't advertise themselves effectively to let
| clients that could benefit know what they could offer, or
| some combination of multiple of those.
|
| What you described sounds really interesting and useful if I
| understand it correctly, and I can think of multiple times
| over the past decade plus that it would have been useful to
| use as a consultant for companies I've worked for, if it
| wasn't too costly.
| andyjohnson0 wrote:
| > What you described sounds really interesting and useful
| if I understand it correctly, and I can think of multiple
| times over the past decade plus that it would have been
| useful to use as a consultant for companies I've worked
| for, if it wasn't too costly.
|
| Yeah I think I was maybe unfair on them to end it that way.
| They were probably ahead of their time, and it was a hard
| sell. I hope the people there went on to do more good
| things.
| marcosmr wrote:
| There are lots of examples of successful ontologies in the
| medical and biomedical domains
| https://bioportal.bioontology.org/
| mercurialsolo wrote:
| Modern production pipelines have a lot of dynamic human fueled
| workflows with orchestration - having a common syntax
| definitely helps those in the control room and operating
| systems and tools have a common way to exchange - especially in
| a remote setup. The netflix production team also has done a
| great job of standardizing the vocabulary across their
| production systems.
|
| A lot of these ontologies depend on adoption in the
| organization and enforcement and without that these efforts
| really are show and of low utility.
| abcanthur wrote:
| The building (AEC- architecture, engineering, construction)
| industries have the IFC format.
| https://technical.buildingsmart.org/standards/ifc/
|
| This is meant to be an interop for various BIM (building
| information modeling) applications. The first generation of
| technical progress in AEC had been largely about computer
| generated geometry, but the lagging needs now are on the
| information attached to the geometry. In the US autodesk's
| Revit is dominant (and reviled) but the IFC open source
| development, namely ifcOpenShell & BlenderBIM, is rapidly
| reaching feature parity. The first computerized cohort of
| architects knows only AutoCAD, the current cohort will be all
| Revit, and I predict right now there is a new split coming as
| much better tools get built. Hypar.io, testfit, speckle etc are
| some of those tools. Ifc is likely to be a part of that, it's a
| fresher, cleaner take than awful Revit and opens up the
| information to much wider platforms.
| halfmatthalfcat wrote:
| Disparate ontologies are ripe in the medical field (SNOMED, ICD
| 9/10, etc) and there are companies[1] trying to map between
| them for better interopt between healthcare networks.
|
| [1] https://clinicalarchitecture.com
| danachow wrote:
| Medical ontologies are different because there are two
| enormous economic incentives for their adoption: billing, in
| the US or any private healthcare - and medical research much
| of which is highly incentivized by the pharma, device, and
| diagnostic industries.
|
| Improving healthcare interop is not something that happens
| unless it is subsidized or penalized. 50 years of healthcare
| IT with systems that are basically the same with some new
| window dressing have proven that.
| cbetti wrote:
| Yes. In the early 2000s Endeca made use of several public
| ontologies to enhance its information access and summarization
| products for clients.
|
| One particularly compelling example that comes to mind was an
| ontology involving public companies, figures, events, and
| relationships that was combined with NLP (entity and concept
| identification) over semi-structured content on the ETL side,
| and faceted search and navigation on the retrieval side, to
| replace a research portal for a major UK newspaper in the mid
| 2000s. The results were mind blowing.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| Complex ontologies (including logical constraints, etc.) have
| mostly been a failure, but lightweight shared
| vocabularies/taxonomies can be very useful. See schema.org for
| a typical example of what these are like.
|
| BTW, XML has fallen out of use for this stuff. JSON-LD can be
| very convenient, though.
| alex_c wrote:
| Music metadata (Musicbrainz, AllMusic, etc...) comes to mind.
| The data is usually more important than the ontology itself,
| and the ontology is not really consistent across the entire
| industry, but it's a somewhat relevant example.
| ok123456 wrote:
| The scope of those is pretty limited (i.e., helping people
| categorize their discogs with a dozen or so common fields)
| and isn't really a "musical ontology" where you're hooking it
| up to a first order logic solver and reasoning about music or
| whatever mythical use case drives most of that work.
| alex_c wrote:
| Sort of... They are used at scale to share and ingest data
| between services, for things like recommendations, etc. But
| it is messy, a lot of the ontology is more or less the same
| but every company/database does things slightly
| differently.
|
| Most of the difficulties are with matching artists and
| content across different databases, which is a separate
| issue. The ontology itself is tangential, but one example
| where it's important (even if it's not a fully / cleanly
| solved problem).
| SkeuomorphicBee wrote:
| Unfortunately the music field never had such collaborative
| effort to build a unified ontology, so each big player have
| its own ontology, and they are not very compatible. From
| personal experience, building software that consumes data
| from multiple sources in music is a nightmare, it is
| impossible to design a data model that fits all the
| incompatible ontologies.
| alex_c wrote:
| Agreed... and it's too late to fix it now.
|
| Relevant XKCD: https://xkcd.com/927/
| tzm wrote:
| Non-paywall: https://outline.com/KYk6bp
| satyanash wrote:
| This looks like a large scale domain modelling problem for the
| movie production process. This is the last place I was expecting
| an overlap between computer engineering and film-making.
|
| But it is not surprising given that large parts of film-making
| are now supported by software, which has a tendency to direct the
| evolution of terminology and concepts.
|
| After a cursory glance at the model, it starts with a fairly
| generic set of primitives: Task, Asset, Participant, Context and
| Relationship. It then creates further instances based on this
| idea.
|
| I'm sure other industries could also benefit from collaborative
| modelling of their problem domains like this.
| [deleted]
| beaconstudios wrote:
| Ontology is part of philosophy, and concerns itself with what
| exists; domain modelling is ontology applied to systems
| (typically software and/or bureaucratic systems).
| georgeecollins wrote:
| In the US there are guilds that have rules that decide who can
| claim what production and who is qualified to do what job. That
| is one of the main reasons why while film is really specialized
| ("gaffers", "grips") you can on a US production know you have
| people who know how to do what they are supposed. It lets huge
| movies staff up or staff down really fast.
|
| I am sure there are people who like the model or hate the model,
| but its creative success in the twentieth is hard to argue with.
| I think as work forces become more flexible, it is something to
| think about.
| danpalmer wrote:
| Maybe I'm just a huge nerd, but this is awesome.
|
| The product I work on ends up doing a lot of work for order
| processing, stock management, logistics, etc. There is no
| industry standard ontology for anything. All off the shelf
| software works in different ways. Terminology is somewhat
| consistent but not at all formally defined.
|
| The idea of being able to build software (or human processes)
| around a well understood ontology is great. Full software
| interoperability is a long way off, but building integration
| points is rarely the challenge when integrating, the real
| challenge is in adapting one way of thinking about a problem to
| fit someone else's entirely different model.
|
| If this is close enough to reality then it doesn't even need lots
| of parties on board with "supporting" it, they could already be
| close enough. Having it all written down is a great next step
| that should enable a lot more products to enter the marketplace.
| danachow wrote:
| Between ISO, UN CEFACT/OASIS, the now irrelevant/repivoted OMG,
| etc it isn't like the idea is a new one or that anything isn't
| written down - there are formal standards (insert xkcd here).
| The incentives for widespread adoption are just not there.
| nerdponx wrote:
| Maybe the problem is too much generality?
|
| An industry-specific ontology seems a lot more tractable than
| a general purpose ontology for all industries.
| jmole wrote:
| And cost - most standards organizations charge money for
| implementations and for training. I find it no coincidence
| that the most widely implemented standards are the ones
| that you can learn about and implement for free.
| [deleted]
| unchocked wrote:
| This is great - now we can have algorithmic production of output
| from data-driven script bots!
| [deleted]
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