Chris, (01)
That is an important observation: (02)
CP> In my experience with working engineers, especially when they
> design artefacts, they need to specify the characteristics of
> the equipment (and its components) they are building. (03)
I'd also like to thank you for the pointer to the surprisingly
fascinating studies by Hasok Chang on boiling water. Following
is a text summary, with video clips that illustrate phenomena
we have all seen, but never really examined: (04)
http://www.ucl.ac.uk/sts/chang/boiling/index.htm (05)
And I also recommend a longer lecture by Chang, which includes
the above examples plus other fascinating points about voltaic
cells (not modern batteries, but the innumerable variations
with poorly understood consequences that had been explored in
around 1800): (06)
http://www.ucl.ac.uk/sts/chang/ (07)
But these studies show that the scope of a thorough treatment
of units of measurement naturally leads to a broader study
of measurement in general, which leads further into a deeper
analysis of all the ways of doing measurements in science
and engineering for the past several centuries. (08)
That raises another question: Where do we stop? (09)
My answer is that all these issues are far too large and far too
important to be dumped into a *module* about units of measurement. (010)
I have always emphasized the need to modularize the ontology.
For the UoM, that implies a very *narrow* treatment of the
terminology of units of measure and their relationships. (011)
I certainly do not want to minimize the importance of the
other issues. On the contrary, they so important that they
do *not* belong in the UoM. Instead, they should be given
a thorough treatment in modules devoted specifically to them. (012)
Meanwhile, the formalization in the UoM should be as neutral
as possible with respect to every upper ontology that has been
widely used (and as many others as we can reasonably imagine). (013)
John (014)
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