MovieLabs publishes common ontology for production • Hacker News Board

Re: MovieLabs publishes common ontology for production

#31

Post by andyjohnson0 » Fri, Oct 01, 2021, 8:56 PM UTC

kbenson wrote: post #30

andyjohnson0 wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 mul…

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…

> 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.

Re: MovieLabs publishes common ontology for production

#32

Post by abcanthur » Fri, Oct 01, 2021, 9:57 PM UTC

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.

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.

Re: MovieLabs publishes common ontology for production

#33

Post by Animats » Fri, Oct 01, 2021, 11:17 PM UTC

Automation was supposed to prevent this.

Years ago, I knew a B-list director who did some of the early films that combined animation and live action. What he wanted to do was make movies with a team of 20 or 30 people. What he was stuck doing was managing a factory with 100-200 people. He was hoping that automation would get the size of the team down to where he could get back to directing. Much as word processing and publishing tools vastly reduced the size of the team needed to edit and print a book.

That didn't happen. Instead, it got worse. Much worse. Look at the credits at the end of a modern action movie. There are about a thousand people involved, at maybe 50 different subcontractors. Today there's a big pre-production and pre-visualization phase just to develop the plans and tooling to make the movie. The budgets are so big that nobody can afford a failure, so efforts to reduce risk dominate. Which is why most movies are now sequels or part of some "franchise".