Re: ontology for units of measurement and/or physical quantities

On 9/14/06, Robert Dodier <robert.dodier@gmail.com> wrote:

> I am interested in the problem of communicating physical quantities,
> e.g. between a web service and its client.

To follow up on my previous message -- it appears that at present
there is not a generally accepted conventional approach for working
with physical quantities. However, it is a popular topic and there
is a lot of material on the web. Here are a couple of links for items
that seem useful in this context.

"An Ontology for Engineering Mathematics" --
http://ksl.stanford.edu/knowledge-sharing/papers/engmath.html
Written back in the 90's, but I think the conceptual stuff is still applicable.
See also the associated Lisp code:
http://www-ksl.stanford.edu/knowledge-sharing/ontologies/html/physical-quantities/physical-quantities.lisp.html

UDUNITS -- library of functions for carrying out units conversions.
http://www.unidata.ucar.edu/software/udunits/
Includes a lengthy list of conversion factors:
http://www.unidata.ucar.edu/software/udunits/udunits.txt

Hope this information is useful to someone!

Robert Dodier

Received on Saturday, 16 September 2006 19:18:31 UTC