John, (01)
That dissertation is a thorough analysis of many issues we have
been discussing in this forum: (02)
JB> Probst, F. (2007) Semantic Reference Systems for Observations
> and Measurements. PhD Thesis, University of Münster
>
http://ifgi.uni-muenster.de/~probsfl/publications/PROBST-Thesis-SemanticReferenceSystemsForObservationsAndMeasurements.pdf (03)
However, it is integrated with the DOLCE ontology. The topics and
the analyses are sufficiently general that they could be adapted
to other ontologies. But it raises some questions: (04)
1. What changes would have to be made to adapt the analysis to
other ontologies, such as OpenCyc, SUMO, BFO, etc. ? (05)
2. Is it possible to generalize the approach so that it could
be formulated in a generic UoM to be used as a microtheory
in any or all of those upper level ontologies? (06)
3. How could it be adapted to the VIM document? (07)
4. In the thread on Quantity Kinds, Ed Barkmeyer and I discussed
the issues about uncertainty and tolerance that are raised
by the VIM document. I searched Probst's dissertation and
found only one mention of uncertainty and no mention of
tolerance. How can those issues be handled? (08)
By the way, the only mention of uncertainty was in the title of
the following document, which Probst cited in his bibliography: (09)
http://physics.nist.gov/cuu/Units/meter.html
The NIST Reference on Constants, Units, and Uncertainty (010)
That document is very short, and it doesn't go into the much
greater detail on the subject in VIM. (011)
But there is still a much more serious issue: computer systems
have been sharing data and interoperating for over half a century
without detailed ontologies. For units of measure, they have
been sharing data using nothing more than the terminology of
kilogram, meter, second, etc. or their abbreviations. (012)
Will any UoM ontology promote better interoperability? Or will it
create more obstacles, problems, and headaches than it can solve? (013)
For further discussion of those last two questions, see Section 7
(slides 119 to 127) of the following presentation: (014)
http://www.jfsowa.com/talks/cnl4ss.pdf (015)
Physicians take an oath, "First do no harm" (Primum non nocere).
I believe that ontologists should take a similar oath. (016)
John Sowa (017)
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