Informatics and quantity calculus

Dear QUOMOS TC

I commend your attempt to produce a definitive Quantities and Units Ontology; it is a really important step to making metrological concepts understandable by software systems. The concepts of ‘quantity’ and ’unit’ seem trivial, but there are other Q&U ontologies (e.g. SysML-QUDV , UOM , UnitDim, sciUnits ), and they all have trouble codifying metrological concepts (primarily ‘quantity’, ‘kind-of-quantity’, and ‘dimension’) and with choosing a set of base quantities (e.g. [amount] and [luminous intensity] are unnecessary; [angle] and [entity] are desirable). I suggest this is because there are unresolved conceptual issues in the main metrology documents the SI, VIM and ISQ. I have reviewed these metrology-related informatics issues in a recent paper. It may help you avoid some frustration.

Foster MP.2010.The next 50 years of the SI: a review of the opportunities for the e-Science age. Metrologia 47 R41-R51.

The International System of Units (SI) was declared as a practical and evolving system in 1960 and is now 50 years old. A large amount of theoretical and experimental work has been conducted to change the standards for the base units from artefacts to physical constants, to improve their stability and reproducibility. Less attention, however, has been paid to improving the SI definitions, utility and usability, which suffer from contradictions, ambiguities and inconsistencies. While humans can often resolve these issues contextually, computers cannot. As an ever-increasing volume and proportion of data about physical quantities is collected, exchanged, processed and rendered by computers, this paper argues that the SI definitions, symbols and syntax should be made more rigorous, so they can be represented wholly and unambiguously in ontologies, programs, data and text, and so the SI notation can be rendered faithfully in print and on screen.

Online at stacks.iop.org/Met/47/R41

Marcus Foster
CSIRO Information Management & Technology

Phone: +61 3 9731 3496 | Mobile: 0414 409 983
marcus.foster@csiro.au | www.csiro.au
Address: 671 Sneydes Rd Werribee 3030

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