[GO-ESSP] Re: Units and NERC DataGrid

Robert Miner RobertM at dessci.com
Mon Dec 6 10:03:35 MST 2004



Hi.

You wrote:

> I also feel that what we need is more along the lines of a semantic web
> resource rather than a downloadable executable approach: in other words
> a units ontology that provides a units vocabulary plus the knowledge
> about which units may be interconverted and how.  Such an ontology could
> be interlinked with parameter vocabularies indicating the subset of
> units that may sensibly be associated with particular parameters.

For what it's worth, your ontology idea sounds more like what the W3C
Math group hears requested from its user community.  

As I follow the discussions here, it seems to me that there are
several kinds of units "standards" people need.  One is some sort of
markup for defining and describing units and their interrelations.
The GML schema, for example, seems to live mostly in this space.

However, another group of users isn't so interested in the units
lanugage per se.  Instead, they want an authoritative central registry
of units of some sort, so that units definitions can be registered,
referenced, retrieved and converted by various user communities.  One
would expect standard physical units would be pretty much static, and
widely referenced.  By the same token, more specialized or
idiosyncrantic units would be more volatile, and primarily shared
within small communities of practice.

In the case of MathML particularly, I don't think people really want
to inline large blocks of units markup.  Rather, they just want to
indicate that this "mu" is the unit defined at XXX.  

--Robert

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Dr. Robert Miner                                RobertM at dessci.com
W3C Math Interest Group Co-Chair                      651-223-2883
Design Science, Inc.   "How Science Communicates"   www.dessci.com
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