Re: Scientific Measurements

Certainly there is uses of precise measurements outside of "science".
 Engineering, specifically, civil engineering, is probably a good example.

I do wonder about how far particular domains will want to go to specify
measurements.

For example, if you are describing a simple measurement of distance, a
simple value like "30m" might suffice.  Yet, for many application domains,
like those of science, a measurement is a complex value of more than a pair
of numerical value and a unit.

The question remains whether it is useful to have different kinds of
measurement structures that match domain users/data more appropriately.

For example, taken directly from the IVOA's UCD document, a particular
measurement of photometric magnitude might consist of:

   * the magnitude, encode in some format with some unit
   * a flag (meta code) on the magnitude indicating the quality of the
measurement
   * the statistical error in the measurement of the magnitude

In addition, there is the question of encoding that the quantity is
intended to measure photometric magnitude and there is also the question of
domain-specific categorization (e.g. is this the magnitude of a star, a
planetoid, or something else).

There's also the question of the technique or physical device used to
measure the quantity.

All this complexity might not be important to certain contexts.



On Wed, Jun 5, 2013 at 9:27 AM, Karen Coyle <kcoyle@kcoyle.net> wrote:

> Alex, do you think that "non-scientific" and "scientific" can share a
> vocabulary? Or are the purposes too different?
>
> It seems like *measurement* itself is general enough to be usable in
> nearly all contexts.
>
> kc
>
>
> On 6/5/13 9:11 AM, Alex Milowski wrote:
>
>> I'm curious if there are any of you working on annotating scientific
>> measurements.  Specifically, I'm looking for structured values that
>> would contain properties such as:
>>
>>     * "the target quantity" - e.g. air temperature, luminosity, etc.
>>     * measurement method
>>     * SI units
>>     * expected error
>>     * category (e.g. surface air temperature vs atmospheric air
>> temperature)
>>
>> Most of my examples come out of weather data but I've also been looking
>> at the measurements used by astronomers as well.
>>
>> In fact, the IVOA's UCD (Unified Content Descriptors) [1] is an
>> interesting approach to creating tuples that are backed by some kind of
>> scientific measurement semantics.  Their approach hasn't been
>> translated, as far as I know, into any kind of RDF-aware schema.
>>
>> [1] http://www.ivoa.net/documents/**latest/UCD.html<http://www.ivoa.net/documents/latest/UCD.html>
>>
>> --
>> --Alex Milowski
>> "The excellence of grammar as a guide is proportional to the paucity of
>> the
>> inflexions, i.e. to the degree of analysis effected by the language
>> considered."
>>
>> Bertrand Russell in a footnote of Principles of Mathematics
>>
>
> --
> Karen Coyle
> kcoyle@kcoyle.net http://kcoyle.net
> ph: 1-510-540-7596
> m: 1-510-435-8234
> skype: kcoylenet
>



-- 
--Alex Milowski
"The excellence of grammar as a guide is proportional to the paucity of the
inflexions, i.e. to the degree of analysis effected by the language
considered."

Bertrand Russell in a footnote of Principles of Mathematics