This is a post (as promised) just simply outlining my thoughts from today’s (27.01.20) VWG meeting more clearly.
Context
There had been a lot of discussion back and forth about the potential futility of creating the one output transform “to rule them all”. In simple terms there are two mutually opposing audiences, the amateurs and the auteurs. On one side we have people that need a mountaineer-guided experience, and on the other we have individuals that already have the compass and route to the image(s) they desire. It had been raised as a question whether to open Pandora’s box and allow anyone to craft an Output Transform (OT) and insert into the ACES system, but this had clearly raised some unease from studios and other content producers in addition to other potential technical concerns. But perhaps there is a middle road, somewhere between one and infinity.
Summary
The high-level concept of “Federated” OTs would be to create a system of adoption and certification of OTs from third parties, and create the appropriate metadata and tracking systems within ACES its self. This adoption system would be in place to validate implementations, ensure core tenants of the ACES philosophy are followed, and ensure that they make a unique and valuable contribution to the community.
Extended Description
In true following of the term “federated” (formed into a single centralized unit, within which each state or organization keeps some internal autonomy), these OTs may be “owned” by an organization/individual which are responsible for crafting and maintaining them to meet new/unknown challenges as the ACES/Imaging community evolves. The responsibility of the ACES Organization its self would be to produce the clear guidelines and requirements that an OT submission must adhere to, and produce an “exemplary” OT which is the pinnacle of all requirements and ideals of the ACES OT Review Procedure which will remain as the “default” and “reference” implementation for all ACES users.
Idealistic Thoughts
The accepted federated Output Transforms should be small in number (2-5), and determined to be orthogonal in the utility they provide. New/altered OTs should be released only with ACES versioned releases and be tracked as a holistic system, as well as having a clear procedure for deprecation.
These Output Transforms should be contributed as CTL and be license compatible with the ACES project. Whether they live directly in the aces-dev Github repo or not is hopefully a trivial implementation detail.
Open Questions to the Group
- Does this correctly ride the line between the amateur and auteurs needs?
- What would this list of requirements/ideals for acceptance be?
- What “orthogonal” OTs can we already think of?
- How would this be tracked and presented to end-users?
Footnotes
- Output Transform == OT == RRT + ODT “Family”
- If this idea is fruitful, this VWG can hopefully be more productive by focusing on the “pinnacle” OT, and a separate group/block of time should be dedicated to the OT system its self
- I am not presenting this as the correct solution, but rather just giving a less vague explanation of what my intent was