RE: Units of Measure (BP, Coverages, SSN,Time?)

> where the UCUM string doesn’t reflect common practice in notation (note that it is limited to the 7-bit ASCII character set)

Not quite. UCUM provides 3 alternatives:

(i)                  Case insensitive 7-bit asci

(ii)                Case-sensitive 7-bit asci

(iii)               Full symbol.

Simon

From: Jon Blower [mailto:j.d.blower@reading.ac.uk]
Sent: Friday, 8 July 2016 11:49 PM
To: Rob Atkinson <rob@metalinkage.com.au>; Clemens Portele <portele@interactive-instruments.de>; m.riechert@reading.ac.uk; public-sdw-wg@w3.org; Cox, Simon (L&W, Clayton) <Simon.Cox@csiro.au>; Linda van den Brink <l.vandenbrink@geonovum.nl>
Subject: Re: Units of Measure (BP, Coverages, SSN,Time?)

Hi Rob,


Ø   so we started this with people talking about the need for a full description, then the use URIs, now a proposal for a label only....

Do you mean “label” in the sense of “human-readable only”? If so, I don’t recall seeing such a proposal. In case it’s not clear from previous posts, the UCUM string is a full *machine-readable* description of the unit, with a defined grammar. Do you believe that this is a “non-interoperable practice”, and if so can you elaborate? What information is missing?

By the way, there might be valid reasons for using a human-readable label *in addition to* the UCUM string, in cases where the UCUM string doesn’t reflect common practice in notation (note that it is limited to the 7-bit ASCII character set). So having both a label a symbol might be considered good practice, and they will often be identical in representation.

Jon



From: Rob Atkinson <rob@metalinkage.com.au<mailto:rob@metalinkage.com.au>>
Date: Friday, 8 July 2016 13:03
To: Clemens Portele <portele@interactive-instruments.de<mailto:portele@interactive-instruments.de>>, Maik Riechert <m.riechert@reading.ac.uk<mailto:m.riechert@reading.ac.uk>>, "public-sdw-wg@w3.org<mailto:public-sdw-wg@w3.org>" <public-sdw-wg@w3.org<mailto:public-sdw-wg@w3.org>>, Rob Atkinson <rob@metalinkage.com.au<mailto:rob@metalinkage.com.au>>, Jon Blower <sgs02jdb@reading.ac.uk<mailto:sgs02jdb@reading.ac.uk>>, "Simon.Cox@csiro.au<mailto:Simon.Cox@csiro.au>" <simon.cox@csiro.au<mailto:simon.cox@csiro.au>>, Linda van den Brink <l.vandenbrink@geonovum.nl<mailto:l.vandenbrink@geonovum.nl>>
Subject: Re: Units of Measure (BP, Coverages, SSN,Time?)


OK...

 so we started this with people talking about the need for a full description, then the use URIs, now a proposal for a label only....

It appears the consensus is also that there is no identifiable good practice, against the range of requirements, let alone a "best" one.

So, do we seek to demonstrate how to apply the broader set of best practices, or stay silent on the issue of how to provide further information about a particular piece of information (which is what a UoM specifier is IMHO).

One can argue this is not a spatial problem, and therefore we cant be held to blame for non-interoperable practices proliferating.

OTOH it is necessary to have a treatment of UoM if we are to have a useful BP for the coverages and SSN cases, and its a key use case for the Time ontology.



On Fri, 8 Jul 2016 at 20:49 Clemens Portele <portele@interactive-instruments.de<mailto:portele@interactive-instruments.de>> wrote:
I agree, too.

It also reflects the experience we have made in GML. In earlier versions of GML we required that every unit is the URI of a unit definition. However, what happened in practice was that many were using symbols like "m" instead of a URI anyway as they are shorter and often better understood (compared to http://www.opengis.net/def/uom/EPSG/0/9001). Therefore we changed this in GML 3.2 to allow symbols, too.

Often UCUM is used for the symbols as it seemed to be the best formalism reflecting the use of symbols in an XML attribute, but this is not a requirement as it was unclear whether this is suitable for all cases (for most cases it is) and because the UCUM long-term governance was unclear and we did not feel comfortable to make this a normative reference.

We added the following note: "It is recommended that the symbol be an identifier for a unit of measure as specified in the 'Unified Code of Units of Measure' (UCUM) (http://aurora.regenstrief.org/UCUM). This provides a set of symbols and a grammar for constructing identifiers for units of measure that are unique, and may be easily entered with a keyboard supporting the limited character set known as 7-bit ASCII. ISO 2955 formerly provided a specification with this scope, but was withdrawn in 2001. UCUM largely follows ISO 2955 with modifications to remove ambiguities and other problems."

Best regards,
Clemens

PS: The URL http://aurora.regenstrief.org/UCUM no longer works (talking about governance).



On 8. Juli 2016 at 10:53:26, Linda van den Brink (l.vandenbrink@geonovum.nl<mailto:l.vandenbrink@geonovum.nl>) wrote:
+1 to Jon’s understanding of “best practice”

Does someone have an example of UCUM? I haven’t come across it before.


Van: Jon Blower [mailto:j.d.blower@reading.ac.uk<mailto:j.d.blower@reading.ac.uk>]
Verzonden: vrijdag 8 juli 2016 10:50
Aan: Rob Atkinson; Linda van den Brink; Simon.Cox@csiro.au<mailto:Simon.Cox@csiro.au>; m.riechert@reading.ac.uk<mailto:m.riechert@reading.ac.uk>; public-sdw-wg@w3.org<mailto:public-sdw-wg@w3.org>
Onderwerp: Re: Units of Measure (BP, Coverages, SSN,Time?)


>  I think however that this is another example where no practice could be recommended that does not include model/profile negotiation

Does a BP really need to be as complicated as this? My understanding of “best practice” is “the best we can realistically do at the moment”, not imagining an idealised scenario that still needs a lot of thinking and discussion.

As an application developer, all I really need is a unit string, plus some information about how to interpret that string (e.g. an indication that the string is derived from the UCUM or UDUNITS grammar). A URI for the unit can also work in simple cases, but in the case of a complex unit I’d much rather have the UCUM string. Maybe the QUDT ontology is useful, but personally I’m struggling to think of a practical use case where I’d want to use this ontology for any kind of reasoning.

If we really want to propose some new approach, I’d like to see the BP explicitly separate “current best practice” from “what could be possible in future”, otherwise the BP document isn’t as helpful as it could be for practitioners.

Cheers,
Jon



From: Rob Atkinson <rob@metalinkage.com.au<mailto:rob@metalinkage.com.au>>
Date: Thursday, 7 July 2016 22:56
To: Linda van den Brink <l.vandenbrink@geonovum.nl<mailto:l.vandenbrink@geonovum.nl>>, Rob Atkinson <rob@metalinkage.com.au<mailto:rob@metalinkage.com.au>>, Jon Blower <sgs02jdb@reading.ac.uk<mailto:sgs02jdb@reading.ac.uk>>, "Simon.Cox@csiro.au<mailto:Simon.Cox@csiro.au>" <Simon.Cox@csiro.au<mailto:Simon.Cox@csiro.au>>, Maik Riechert <m.riechert@reading.ac.uk<mailto:m.riechert@reading.ac.uk>>, "public-sdw-wg@w3.org<mailto:public-sdw-wg@w3.org>" <public-sdw-wg@w3.org<mailto:public-sdw-wg@w3.org>>
Subject: Re: Units of Measure (BP, Coverages, SSN,Time?)


I'll put the conversation into this format. I'll put some placeholders for volunteers to put in worked examples of what they think are BP implementations and important and illustrative exemplar cases.

I think however that this is another example where no practice could be recommended that does not include model/profile negotiation (distinct from content-negotation which has been given a very narrow scope).  The reason is that there is no perfect, well governed and agreed model or list of possible units (two separate requirements) and that both need to co-exist - so any practice has to build in the mechanism to either migrate to  an emerging standard or to allow support for multiple competing solutions.

Or put it another way - all the incredibly hard problems around different UoM systems and finding a BP recomendation are simplified by a BP that allows for content models. If we are going to have a general statement about this in the wider BP, the UoM case can reference it. We dont need to overspecify the mechanism here - but warning people that such a capability is a longer term requirement can usefully guide implementation.

Rob

On Fri, 8 Jul 2016 at 00:14 Linda van den Brink <l.vandenbrink@geonovum.nl<mailto:l.vandenbrink@geonovum.nl>> wrote:
Hi – just trying to get through the SDW email.

When I apply the template we use in the BP it would be like this:

Name of the BP: *Use a URI identifier for UoM* (or a bit better worded)
*why* … a problem description I could probably get somewhere from this thread
*Intended Outcome* data user can look up the URI and get information about  the UoM
*possible approach to implementation* recommended representations include QUDT, SKOS, UCUM, OWL-class?, any standard relevant to the community of practice.

I would very much appreciate it if starters of threads would make summaries like the above…

Content negotiation is a neat subject but not specific to spatial.. I don’t think we should tackle this problem in the BP, or am I missing something?.

Van: Rob Atkinson [mailto:rob@metalinkage.com.au<mailto:rob@metalinkage.com.au>]
Verzonden: dinsdag 5 juli 2016 00:33
Aan: Jon Blower; Simon.Cox@csiro.au<mailto:Simon.Cox@csiro.au>; rob@metalinkage.com.au<mailto:rob@metalinkage.com.au>; m.riechert@reading.ac.uk<mailto:m.riechert@reading.ac.uk>; public-sdw-wg@w3.org<mailto:public-sdw-wg@w3.org>
Onderwerp: Re: Units of Measure (BP, Coverages, SSN,Time?)

Thanks for the insights Simon.

It will take some care to turn this into a best practice recipe that doesnt get broken immediately IMHO.
We can get out of jail from an engineering perspective by saying you should use a URI identifier for UoM that allows content-negotiation to access one or more representations.
Recommended representations include:
1) QUDT structural description
2) SKOS as a canonical means to describe labels and provide links to alternative codes
3) UCUM specification if relevant for the UoM
4) OWL-class ?
4) Any representations defined by standards organisations relevant to the community of practice

(Content negotiation can be driven by MIME-type in headers or by explicit view parameters - need a separate BP around this that encompasses the UK and other LDA examples - its a pattern that generally allows us to take on a de-facto option and migrate to a de jure standard when it evolves - which we see as the most common pattern just about everywhere.  We also either need to specify a set of views and their corresponding OWL models , or a way to bind any view to its relevant OWL model in a general way )

We can further recommend the UCUM URI structure.

If necessary we can deploy such representations - I dont mind taking on the deploying using the URI redirection machinery I have deployed at  resources.opengeospatial.org<http://resources.opengeospatial.org>. Would prefer someone to provide some endorsed representations - HTML, JSON-LD, RDF  - for QUDT, SKOS and OWL-class.

Minimum would be for some examples (simple, derived-with UCUM equiv, derived-without UCUM equiv). A complete set would be just as easy to deploy.



On Mon, 4 Jul 2016 at 19:23 Jon Blower <j.d.blower@reading.ac.uk<mailto:j.d.blower@reading.ac.uk>> wrote:

>  Ideally we would have a reliable set of URIs for UOMs which could leverage the UCUM algorithm to build the URI, and which would resolve to a QUDT-based representation of the unit of measure.

+1

Is it possible to use the UCUM symbol for the UoM the URI suffix? Or are there problems like character-encoding issues?

Cheers,
Jon

From: "Simon.Cox@csiro.au<mailto:Simon.Cox@csiro.au>" <Simon.Cox@csiro.au<mailto:Simon.Cox@csiro.au>>
Date: Monday, 4 July 2016 01:13
To: "rob@metalinkage.com.au<mailto:rob@metalinkage.com.au>" <rob@metalinkage.com.au<mailto:rob@metalinkage.com.au>>, Jon Blower <sgs02jdb@reading.ac.uk<mailto:sgs02jdb@reading.ac.uk>>, Maik Riechert <m.riechert@reading.ac.uk<mailto:m.riechert@reading.ac.uk>>, "public-sdw-wg@w3.org<mailto:public-sdw-wg@w3.org>" <public-sdw-wg@w3.org<mailto:public-sdw-wg@w3.org>>
Subject: RE: Units of Measure (BP, Coverages, SSN,Time?)

Lets be clear about what QUDT and UCUM actually offer.

QUDT -

•         primarily provides a model for descriptions of units of measure, and of quantity-kinds (a.k.a. qualities, or “observable properties”); the model is formalized using OWL, and thus provides an RDF-based syntax for description of a uom or a quantity-kind

•         also provides some lists (called ‘vocabularies’) of individual unit- and quantity-kind- descriptions, but which is very idiosyncratic and incomplete (includes a whole bunch of currencies!)

•         there are no rules for how the labels or symbols for units are built in the QUDT vocabularies; they are not aligned with the ISO or SI standards (e.g. the label for the unit of length is spelled ‘Meter’, and the symbol for the unit of temperature is ‘degC’), capitalization is inconsistent, and use of non-asci character set is variable

•         the maintenance arrangements for QUDT are private (TopQuadrant +  NASA) and the publication arrangements are flaky (QUDT v2.0 has been ‘on the way’ for about 3 years, and even though it is linked the qudt.org<http://qudt.org> website, it has been 404 for over a year).

UCUM –

•         Focuses on a rule for how to generate a symbol for a ‘derived uom’

•         uses a rigorous algorithm based on a theory of quantities and dimensional analysis, which starts from any base set of units in a rational system (SI, MKS, cgs, even pounds-feet-seconds if you want!)

•         UCUM provides a base set of symbols corresponding essentially with SI, plus symbols for the standard power of ten prefixes (micro/milli/kilo/mega etc). The base set has some fudging to get around the anomaly that the SI base unit for mass (kg) already has a power-of-ten prefix built in.

•         The algorithm and base set of symbols is such that symbols generated following UCUM are aligned with conventional usage, and with ISO 1000

•          There is some additional notation using {} and [] to allow for annotations and ‘conventional’ units, which I always get confused about.

My assessment is that the QUDT Ontology v1.1 is good enough, (I was on an Ontolog telecon with Pat Hayes, Ralph Hodgson, Gary Berg-Cross a couple of years ago where that was the clear consensus) but the QUDT vocabularies are not. So we need another set of URIs denoting uoms, with the expectation that dereferencing one of these would result in a QUDT-based representation.
Ideally we would have a reliable set of URIs for UOMs which could leverage the UCUM algorithm to build the URI, and which would resolve to a QUDT-based representation of the unit of measure. These representations should be built on-the-fly using the UCUM engine.

Note that, using QUDT, a uom description is an OWL _individual_ (not a class), but with complete semantics, still supporting some reasoning. Rob – going with individuals doesn’t mean you have to us SKOS and certainly doesn’t lose semantic precision -  probably best not to casually suggest that!

Simon


From: Rob Atkinson [mailto:rob@metalinkage.com.au<mailto:rob@metalinkage.com.au>]
Sent: Saturday, 2 July 2016 1:32 PM
To: Jon Blower <j.d.blower@reading.ac.uk<mailto:j.d.blower@reading.ac.uk>>; Rob Atkinson <rob@metalinkage.com.au<mailto:rob@metalinkage.com.au>>; Cox, Simon (L&W, Clayton) <Simon.Cox@csiro.au<mailto:Simon.Cox@csiro.au>>; m.riechert@reading.ac.uk<mailto:m.riechert@reading.ac.uk>; public-sdw-wg@w3.org<mailto:public-sdw-wg@w3.org>
Subject: Re: Units of Measure (BP, Coverages, SSN,Time?)

Hi Jon

The encoding scheme issue raises a duality between class and instance - any UoM could be expressed as as either an instance (with SKOS encoding as a natural default) or a Class - RDFS or OWL being the default options. In addition a meta-model of UoM could be defined in RDFS or OWL and used to drive encodings of instances.

Personally, I think that in the Web we should specify that a URI is used if one is available - and that an encoding of its details may be used as annotation. In the case of an "anonymous" UoM, then the encoding will still probably need to reference base units using URIs.

The wrinkles are whether URIs are explicit, or encoded as items in a namespace - and whether any encoding scheme (model) may be used or one is recommended, and if the model itself needs to be explicitly referenced (presumably this applies to JSON-LD, RDFA etc as RDF will always use URIs to specify the model elements anyways.

A worked example set with:
1) just URI from a well-known vocabulary (UCUM)
2) A encoded UoM with one URI, and a simple label
3) ditto, with a more complex set of details
4) ditto with more that one URI (e.g. UCUM and QUDT)
5) a blank/anonymous encoded UoM with base measures.

Would we go so far as to recommend QUDT as the meta-model (as per example provided?) - or simply list a few in use and provide a couple of examples?

This will cover the "follow-your-nose" cases - however there is the case of a data encoding where the UoM is specified in metadata. The question here then is defining a BP for this metadata.
One option - we can use RDF-QB to define data structures and relevant UoM. I'm not sure there is an obvious alternative to ad-hoc metadata models and UoM specified any non-interoperable way that emerges.

This option then speaks directly to the coverages metadata perspective (encoding of data using RD-QB becomes a trivial case - we simply state that if RDF encoding, then BP would be to use RDF-QB encoding consistent with the RDF-QB metadata for the set, and the interesting and more generally useful case is describing an existing or compact encoding usefully)

Rob

On Sat, 2 Jul 2016 at 02:20 Jon Blower <j.d.blower@reading.ac.uk<mailto:j.d.blower@reading.ac.uk>> wrote:
Hi Rob – yes, I think those are the missing bits, but, just to reiterate, it may not be (just) a “vocabulary” that we need (in the sense of a set of URIs), but a serialisation scheme for any unit.

For concrete examples, we should look at where we need to use units. I think we have:


1.       As part of coordinate systems and coordinate reference systems

2.       As part of measured quantities (e.g. the range of a coverage), linked to observed properties etc

3.       …

My last paragraph wasn’t very clear, sorry. I was trying to say that the different uses (coordinate systems, observed properties) might actually have different best practices in terms of the encoding of their units. We could feasibly decide that coordinate system units are best expressed as URIs, but the units of observed properties are better expressed as strings in a named serialisation scheme (like UCUM). Maybe, I don’t know – just raising the possibility.

Cheers,
Jon


From: Rob Atkinson <rob@metalinkage.com.au<mailto:rob@metalinkage.com.au>>
Date: Friday, 1 July 2016 14:39
To: Jon Blower <sgs02jdb@reading.ac.uk<mailto:sgs02jdb@reading.ac.uk>>, Rob Atkinson <rob@metalinkage.com.au<mailto:rob@metalinkage.com.au>>, "Simon.Cox@csiro.au<mailto:Simon.Cox@csiro.au>" <Simon.Cox@csiro.au<mailto:Simon.Cox@csiro.au>>, Maik Riechert <m.riechert@reading.ac.uk<mailto:m.riechert@reading.ac.uk>>, "public-sdw-wg@w3.org<mailto:public-sdw-wg@w3.org>" <public-sdw-wg@w3.org<mailto:public-sdw-wg@w3.org>>

Subject: Re: Units of Measure (BP, Coverages, SSN,Time?)


This is the type of recommendation i think we need. Lets refine... the missing bits are:
1 guidance on what vocabulary.. even noting that different communities use different ones and naming them is a help.
2 provision of mappings if you want to interoperate across community choice here.. do you embed multiple uris, or provide sone sort of sameAs service?
3 concrete examples

I dont quite follow the final paragraph and the implications for what the encoding would look like?

Rob

On Fri, 1 Jul 2016 11:12 am Jon Blower <j.d.blower@reading.ac.uk<mailto:j.d.blower@reading.ac.uk>> wrote:
Just to add a little to this – units of measure are very tricky in general. The overall requirement, I think, is to have an unambiguous serialisation scheme for units, including both base units (the easy cases) and the infinite number of derived units (the hard cases) – that is to say, a spec for serialising units to ASCII strings. This allows clients to convert between units, which is a primary use case for having “strongly typed” units.

In terms of serialisations, I’m aware of UCUM and UDUNITS (the latter is used extensively in climate/met/ocean and is connected with CF). I don’t think either are perfect in terms of governance, and I’m not even sure that UDUNITS has a formal spec.

Then there are URIs. QUDT has URIs for a lot of base and derived units, but it can’t possibly have them all, hence the need for a scheme that allows any unit to be serialised. So there will always be gaps, but I note that QUDT covers a lot of the common cases I can think of – so it’s not clear to me how important the gaps are.

Typical clients will just want to display the symbol for the unit, so we should make sure that, if we use URIs, we also transmit the symbol, as I doubt that a typical web client will want to resolve the URI and look up the symbol. This is effectively what Maik is doing, by transmitting the symbol plus a URI for the unit *scheme* rather than a URI for the unit itself.

(Question – does QUDT use UCUM as a means of generating the unit symbol?)

There are a few tricky cases in science – e.g. salinity, which strictly has no units and is a very weird kind of quantity – and sometimes these tricky cases lead to poor practice in real data files – i.e. expressing units incorrectly or inconsistently. (and of course, poor practice can happen in real-world data files anywhere).

I think an overall BP recommendation would be:


1.       Express units unambiguously if possible, using a named unit serialisation scheme or URI.

2.       Give the unit symbol, and perhaps a longer explanatory text string (e.g. a rdfs:label), to help simple clients understand the unit, even if they don’t want to resolve the full unit description.

3.       Also allow users to record “ad hoc” unit strings for fallback cases that don’t fit well with existing serialisation or URI schemes, making it clear that these are not really machine-understandable

There may be cases where we can refine this further depending on the use case. For example, in CRS definitions, which tend to use simple units, it’s probably desirable to use well-known URIs to represent units. For recording the units of a measured quantity (e.g. the range of the coverage), I like methods like the one Maik suggested, as this maps more neatly to common practice in my community.

Cheers,
Jon


From: Rob Atkinson <rob@metalinkage.com.au<mailto:rob@metalinkage.com.au>>
Date: Friday, 1 July 2016 08:46
To: "Simon.Cox@csiro.au<mailto:Simon.Cox@csiro.au>" <Simon.Cox@csiro.au<mailto:Simon.Cox@csiro.au>>, "rob@metalinkage.com.au<mailto:rob@metalinkage.com.au>" <rob@metalinkage.com.au<mailto:rob@metalinkage.com.au>>, Maik Riechert <m.riechert@reading.ac.uk<mailto:m.riechert@reading.ac.uk>>, "public-sdw-wg@w3.org<mailto:public-sdw-wg@w3.org>" <public-sdw-wg@w3.org<mailto:public-sdw-wg@w3.org>>

Subject: Re: Units of Measure (BP, Coverages, SSN,Time?)
Resent-From: <public-sdw-wg@w3.org<mailto:public-sdw-wg@w3.org>>
Resent-Date: Friday, 1 July 2016 08:47

Perfect Simon - thanks.
Its not that obvious trawling the docs what the pragmatic aspects are.

So I would suggest then that a BP endorsed by OGC would have a minimum requirement that a mapping to UCUM is provided for any vocabulary used for UoM, to provide for compatibility with existing recommendations (can we call these BP?)

If it helps I could set up a OGC resource for UCUM - with redirects for specific terms - instead of to the containing spec (thats the way UCUM works) - or to a SKOS resource with skos:exactMatch relationships to the UCUM terms.  I can also deploy a crosswalk to UCUM from another UoM vocab if we decide to recommend it.

The onoging governance of such a resource in the context of the BP can be taken up as a action from the SDW to the OGC (what is the appropriate point of contact here? NA, OAB, TC, PC?)

Rob

On Fri, 1 Jul 2016 at 16:10 <Simon.Cox@csiro.au<mailto:Simon.Cox@csiro.au>> wrote:

>  If OGC has adopted UCUM as a BP (can someone make a definitive statement on this …

OGC’s endorsement of UCUM comes from

1.      It is recommended in WMS [1]

2.      Ditto GML [2]

3.      There is a branch of the www.opengis.net/def/<http://www.opengis.net/def/> URI set for UCUM - http://www.opengis.net/def/uom/UCUM/ but just redirects to the UCUM spec [3]

But that is purely pragmatic, as it seemed to be the best thing around at the time.
It has a fragile governance arrangement, and URIs are not de-referenceable.

[1] http://www.opengeospatial.org/standards/wms version 1.3 clause C.2.
[2] http://www.opengeospatial.org/standards/gml v3.2.1 clause 8.2.3.6<http://www.opengeospatial.org/standards/gml%20v3.2.1%20clause%208.2.3.6>
[3] http://unitsofmeasure.org/ucum.html


From: Rob Atkinson [mailto:rob@metalinkage.com.au<mailto:rob@metalinkage.com.au>]
Sent: Friday, 1 July 2016 1:46 AM
To: Maik Riechert <m.riechert@reading.ac.uk<mailto:m.riechert@reading.ac.uk>>; Rob Atkinson <rob@metalinkage.com.au<mailto:rob@metalinkage.com.au>>; SDW WG Public List <public-sdw-wg@w3.org<mailto:public-sdw-wg@w3.org>>
Subject: Re: Units of Measure (BP, Coverages, SSN,Time?)

Thanks Maik,

If i read this right, this example assumes the client understands qudt - then uses the semantics of qudt:symbol to map instances (Cel)  in another namespace to this.  UCUM uses http://purl.oclc.org/NET/muo/ucum/unit/temperature/degree-Celsius as the id - but the information to map to that is not present. Is "Cel" just a dummy example - would you actually want to say "degree-Celsius" - and in turn want the OGC redirect to respect that and redirect
http://www.opengis.net/def/uom/UCUM/degree-Celsius to   http://purl.oclc.org/NET/muo/ucum/unit/temperature/degree-Celsius?


What about the original assumption of using QUDT - why not use UCUM or another in the first instance. Coming from the outside and trying to identify a best practice, what exactly is this example saying?

If OGC has adopted UCUM as a BP (can someone make a definitive statement on this - it should be present in the BP when we talk about vocabulary re-use - a list of vocabularies in use in the OGC space) then we should start with that perhaps? If we are saying the BP requirement is to allow an emerging body of QUDT usage to interoperate then we need perhaps to recommend publishing the mappings as a resource - whatever we think is BP we need to communicate clearly to the average user who wont have years of exposure to the history and details to draw on - and will most likely simply want to maximise interoperability of a few cases.

Cheers
Rob

On Fri, 1 Jul 2016 at 01:00 Maik Riechert <m.riechert@reading.ac.uk<mailto:m.riechert@reading.ac.uk>> wrote:

Hi Rob,

I just wanted to throw in a slightly different/complementary view on this.

While it is useful to have URIs for any kind of unit, I think it is even more useful to have a symbolic coding in a certain coding scheme for those units, because then clients with support for that scheme can easily parse the unit, and transform it and the associated numbers. One scheme example is UCUM (http://unitsofmeasure.org/ucum.html). OGC gave it a URI as well: http://www.opengis.net/def/uom/UCUM/


In my opinion you would have something like that (JSON-LD):

{
  "@context": {
    "rdf": "http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#"<http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns>,
    "qudt": "http://qudt.org/schema/qudt#"<http://qudt.org/schema/qudt>,
    "skos": "http://www.w3.org/2004/02/skos/core#"<http://www.w3.org/2004/02/skos/core>
  },
  "rdf:value": 27.5, // for example purposes only
  "qudt:unit": {
    "@id": "qudt:DegreeCelsius",
    "skos:prefLabel": { "en": "Degree Celsius" },
    "qudt:symbol": {
      "@type": "http://www.opengis.net/def/uom/UCUM/"<http://www.opengis.net/def/uom/UCUM/>,
      "@value": "Cel"
    }
  }
}
So the main point is that the value of "qudt:symbol" has a custom data type, in this case http://www.opengis.net/def/uom/UCUM/.


Cheers

Maik

Am 30.06.2016 um 15:14 schrieb Rob Atkinson:
Hi,

I'm looking into the BP aspects around defining data dimensions as a framework for evaluating and contributing to various SDW threads. One which seems to cut across, but I havent seen an explicit treatment of the UoM problem. I know I may have missed previous conversatiosn - but I dont see any treatment in the current reviewable docs.

Specifically, if I was to follow the W3C Data on the Web Best Practices I would be led via BP #2

"To express frequency of update an instance from the Content-Oriented Guidelines developed as part of the W3C Data Cube Vocabulary efforts was used."

to this statement:
"To express the value of this attribute we would typically use a common thesaurus of units of measure. For the sake of this simple example we will use the DBpedia resource http://dbpedia.org/resource/Year which corresponds to the topic of the Wikipedia page on "Years".

If we have a Time ontology - surely we would be pointing to that as a recommendation for temporal units of measure.
Likewise, i would have thought that OGC would have an interest in binding CRS with their in built units of measure to spatial dimensions.
One could argue that without interoperability at this level there is a question why the OGC would have any involvement in Web standards - but if there is a counter-argument then I feel this needs to be front-and-centre of the BP to explain to a potential user what they can expect, and where they are going to be left with making all the significant decisions.

If we have Time and CRS UoM, then we may be able to get away with not specifiying a vocabulary for other UoM for measurements. Are there any obvious dimensions that need UoM vocabularies?

When I specify O&M profiles, (my driving use case), I'll need to specify the UoM for measurements - is there any recommendation regarding which vocabulary to choose?   And for CRS based dimensions?

Rob Atkinson