comment: looking forward to treatment of units of measure for use in RDF Calendar work

We just released a note about the RDF calendar work.
One of the long-standing issues is how to deal with
timezones.

[[
Note that NY:tz timezone is used as a datatype. Earlier, we used
separate properties for time and timezone, which is initially appealing
but problematic for reasons that are detailed in the
InterpretationProperties pattern.
]]
http://www.w3.org/TR/2005/NOTE-rdfcal-20050929/#L21805


There's some sense in which 1pm Chicago time is equal
to 2pm New York time, and it's parallel to the way
10 centimeters is 100 millimeters.

Here's the relevant bit of the InterpretationProperties topic:

[[

An intuitively obvious way to model quantities is: 

:building :height [ :magnitude "20"; :units :meter].

But this is a train wreck waiting to happen, because we'd like 

[ :magnitude "20"; :units :meter] = [ :magnitude "2000"; :units :centimeter].
:building :height [ :magnitude "2000"; :units :centimeter].


but then we get 

:building :height [ :magnitude "20", "2000"; :units :meter, :centimeter]

which is all messed up. 

Therefore, 

Use InterpretationProperties to relate quantities to magnitudes: 

:building :height [ :meters "20"; :centimeters "2000" ].

But 

For RdfCalendar, it's not clear whether 11am Chicago time is really the
same as 10am New York time. For iCalendar round-tripping, it's probably
not sufficient to convert everything to Z time, especially when you
consider recurring events. 
]]


It occurred to me that this is a problem with n-ary relations, so
I just took another look at
  http://www.w3.org/TR/swbp-n-aryRelations/

but I see it's TBD: "For a discussion on how to represent units
and quantities in OWL, please refer to a different note (ref to
be added)".

I look forward to any work in that area. Is there any sort of
draft I could take an early look at?


-- 
Dan Connolly, W3C http://www.w3.org/People/Connolly/
D3C2 887B 0F92 6005 C541  0875 0F91 96DE 6E52 C29E

Received on Friday, 30 September 2005 22:44:42 UTC