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MovieLabs publishes common ontology for production

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Re: MovieLabs publishes common ontology for production

#11

Post by cbetti »

ok123456 wrote: post #7

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.

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.

Re: MovieLabs publishes common ontology for production

#12

Post by andyjohnson0 »

ok123456 wrote: post #7

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.

> 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.

Re: MovieLabs publishes common ontology for production

#13

Post by [deleted] »

satyanash wrote: post #2

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 generi…

[deleted]

Re: MovieLabs publishes common ontology for production

#14

Post by zozbot234 »

ok123456 wrote: post #7

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.

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.

Re: MovieLabs publishes common ontology for production

#15

Post by georgeecollins »

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.

Re: MovieLabs publishes common ontology for production

#16

Post by karaterobot »

alvarlagerlof wrote: post #4

Eli5?

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.

Re: MovieLabs publishes common ontology for production

#17

Post by nerdponx »

danachow wrote: post #6
danpalmer wrote: post #3

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 ontol…

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.

Maybe the problem is too much generality?

An industry-specific ontology seems a lot more tractable than a general purpose ontology for all industries.

Re: MovieLabs publishes common ontology for production

#19

Post by [deleted] »

nerdponx wrote: post #17
danachow wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Maybe the problem is too much generality? An industry-specific ontology seems a lot more tractable than a general purpose ontology for all industries.

[deleted]

Re: MovieLabs publishes common ontology for production

#20

Post by danachow »

halfmatthalfcat wrote: post #10
ok123456 wrote: post #7

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.

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

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.

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