Comments on Proposed Change to Measure

[Arthur Ryman <ryman@ca.ibm.com>]

TC Members,

I reviewed the proposed change from two weeks ago. [1] You added "unit of 
measure" to Measure, which is good. However you propose to use strings 
instead of URIs to identify the unit of measure: 
"- Unit is a String type for light weight usage. URI seems a little too 
strict for our usage."

This can lead to problems. At OSLC and in IBM Rational we have found that 
when we allow people to use a string as the value of an attribute, e.g. 
for work item severity or priority, then everyone uses something 
different. This makes it very difficult to write queries that combine data 
from projects that come from different teams or organizations, speaking 
possibly different languages.

In the OSLC CM V3.0 spec, new URIs are defined for priority and severity. 
[2] In general, it is useful to define standard URIs for important 
concepts, and to precisely define these concepts in a vocabulary document. 
That is how the OSLC EMS specification handles units of measure. Recall 
that the first principle of Linked Data is to use URIs as names for 
things. [3]

[1] 
https://www.oasis-open.org/apps/org/workgroup/oslc-promcode/download.php/53645/meeting-note-07232014.doc
[2] 
http://open-services.net/wiki/change-management/Specification-3.0/#Resource_Severity
[3] http://www.w3.org/DesignIssues/LinkedData.html

Regards, 
___________________________________________________________________________
Arthur Ryman, PhD

Chief Data Officer, Rational
Chief Architect, Portfolio & Strategy Management
Distinguished Engineer | Master Inventor | Academy of Technology

Toronto Lab | +1-905-413-3077 (office) | +1-416-939-5063 (mobile)