[humanmarkup] [measurment] Type toolkit initial draft

["Emmanuil Batsis (Manos)" <mbatsis@humanmarkup.org>]

Hi all,

As you probably know, we have been working on the (subjective) 
measurment problem using RDF(S). Some people on this list, including Rex 
Brooks, James Landrum and myself believe this will play a major role in 
the HumanMarkup framework (although it's applicability may go beyond 
that point).

The basic idea is to define some base classes and properties, to be used 
as a toolkit in vertical (subjective) development. Some requierments are:

* Ability to define types based on common programming language primitive 
types.

* Ability to define from-to ranges.

* Ability to define types of finite possible values.

* Ability to map ranges to human friendly representations (for example 
#000 is 'black', where the range has an order of one).

* Introduce the 'meaning' of sets, having members of a certain type and 
the mechanisms to build those. For example, RGB may be expressed through 
a set of three 0_to_255 values. Sets containing various types are not 
needed, that's what classes are ;-)

* Possibly the ability to map different measurment systems through 
formulas (via inference, not by hand!).

Sadly, RDF does not (yet) include the proper infastructure to build 
upon. So in my initial approach, I decided to import the W3C XML Schema 
simple types hierarchy in the form of classes and experiment with 
expressing relationships between classes. This is highly incomplete and 
unstable; it's purpose is to expose just one approach to receive opinions.

This document will evolve to cover it's initial target (measurment) but 
we cannot avoid dealing with the basic things first.

You can find the draft RDF schema attached. Documentation is not 
available but the comments inside point to important issues.

It's worth mentioning that the document was created using Isaviz [1], an 
open source RDF editor and viewer. I highly recomment you download it to 
inspect the document.

Comments, suggestions, corrections and any other (especially negative 
and/or creative) feedback should be sent on 
humanmarkup-comment@lists.oasis-open.org

[1] http://www.w3.org/2001/11/IsaViz/

Thanks,

Manos

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