Or am I a nominal pragmatist? (01)
In the "What is Mass?" thread there are references to tropes, which was
a completely new term that I didn't understand until I followed a few
discussions in the ontolog-forum. Then Matthew West wrote "My lump of
cheese is a member of the 1.3Kg equivalence class" and it causes me a
bit of concern. (02)
Neither the use of the term 'trope' nor mapping of a thing like a lump
cheese into an 'equivalence class' is going to fly very far with
software engineers, programmers, or architects. (03)
When this standard gets published, I expect that these people will begin
with the notion (or could eventually be convinced) that properties of an
object, fields of a structure, and columns of a database table could be
improved by annotating them with a unit of measure. Having a
consistent label for the annotation and a consistent way of applying it
is a good thing, they'll keep reading. (04)
Up front there will probably be some clause that says "how the unit of
measure is associated with the value is a local matter", so don't expect
this standard to propose a new kind of property for an object, a new
type of database column. That leaves "presentation" or "exchange" issues. (05)
So how do I, as a architect, tell my programmers to present the fact
that my lump of cheese is 1.3Kg rather than 1.3 (un-annotated)? As a
character string in a comma-delimited text file? (06)
...,"1.3 Kg",... (07)
How do I do it in XML? (08)
<weight uom:unit="Kg">1.3</weight> (09)
RDF? (010)
:myCheeseLump :weight
[ rdf:value "1.3"^^xsd:decimal; uom:unit uom-si:Kg ] . (011)
I know that while my database calls it 'weight', it should probably be
called 'mass', but is that really important? Can I still call it
'weight' and take advantage of the standard? (012)
I'm exchanging data with a partner, and while my stuff is in Kg, his
database uses lbs. How does this standard help me know if Kg can be
converted to lbs, and how can that be accomplished? (013)
On to the next layer of abstraction. (014)
My database has many tables and many columns, does this standard provide
a way to say column Y of table X is always Kg? (015)
What if its a count? My transaction database has a QTY column which is
a count of widgets. Is a 'widget' a proper unit of measure? Can I
expression "widgets per day" as something I have measured? (016)
Now I would like to improve the way my programmers use values. In some
cases the programmers have added two values together and they are not
the same unit, does the standard provide a way of knowing if two
annotated values can be added? In some cases, like widgets, it is
required that the values be integers, 1.5 widgets doesn't make sense.
How can I say that the value is restricted to be an integer? (017)
More generally, how is this standard going move from "trope" to being
the stimulus motivating systems architects to change their systems
...dare I say... tropism? (018)
:-) (019)
Joel
p.s.- while I can't join immediately, I'm looking forward to today's
conference call (020)
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