[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] Re: Re: What are units-of-measure? e.g., what's a "kilometer"?
If my application has to be aware of "kilometer" as a property/relation/function, then it also has to be aware of "mile", "furlong", etc in the same way. From a parsing, schema and implementation perspective, this makes things more difficult than viewing it as a value of an abstract property such as "unit". So, in the context of the length of the Yangtze, the conventional view makes a lot of sense and the property/relation/function interpretation doesn't seem to buy you very much at first blush. That said, in the context of, say, a lexicon or history of measurement terms, I might want to treat it as a class itself. In that context, kilometer itself has properties. I might be interested in the standardization body that defines it, the location of the definitive reference measure, the origin of the word, etc. Again, context is king, which is a large part of what makes generalized semantics so difficult. Linda -------Original Message------- From: "Roger L. Costello" <costello@m...> Sent: 07/17/03 10:44 AM To: xml-dev@l... Subject: Re: What are units-of-measure? e.g., what's a "kilometer"? > > roger.day@g... wrote: > I'd go for: > > <River id="Yangtze"> > <length unit="kilometer">6300</length> > </River> > If we grant that kilometer is a property/relation/function between a distance dimension object and a number, then the choice of representations would be: <River id="Yangtze"> <length kilometers="6300"/> </River> or alternatively: <River id="Yangtze"> <length> <kilometer>6300</kilometer> </length> </River> This is quite a radical approach. I am surprised that there aren't more comments, since the "conventional wisdom" is not to treat kilometer as a property/relation/function, but rather to treat it as the value of a property, e.g., <River id="Yangtze"> <length unit="kilometer">6300</length> </River> Thoughts? /Roger ----------------------------------------------------------------- The xml-dev list is sponsored by XML.org <http://www.xml.org>, an initiative of OASIS <http://www.oasis-open.org> The list archives are at http://lists.xml.org/archives/xml-dev/ To subscribe or unsubscribe from this list use the subscription manager: <http://lists.xml.org/ob/adm.pl> >
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