RE: [quomos-comment] Informatics and quantity calculus

Marcus,

                I
would like to compliment you on your fascinating article in Metrologia. Perhaps
you were responsible for my receiving the link to the article: http://herald.iop.org/met/m17/sxp//link/4035
from them recently. Your arguments directly support
our QUOMOS effort, where we continue to argue the case for a more formal and
rigorous representation for quantities, units and dimensions, and will
hopefully provide ammunition for increased participation.

                I
am copying the QUOMOS committee on this email, as they might not have seen your
posting to quomos-comment. 

 

Thanks again for a thoughtful
piece.

 

 

Steven R. Ray, Ph.D.

Distinguished Research Fellow

Carnegie Mellon University

NASA Research Park

Building 23 (MS 23-11)

P.O. Box 1

Moffett Field, CA 94305-0001

Email: 

Phone: (650) 587-3780

Cell:  (202) 316-6481

 

From:
 [mailto:] 

Sent: Wednesday, October 20, 2010 6:21 PM

To: ''

Subject: [quomos-comment] 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

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