On 16 Jan, 14:59, Tom Wright <te...@spam.ac.uk> wrote:
> The Magpie wrote:

> > Are you actually looking for information on RDF resource dictionaries?
>
> Yes, I think I am. =A0I didn't know that it was RDF that I was after, but=
 what
> I want is a standard resource listing units of measure which can be used =
to
> make combining scientific data from different sources easy. =A0

It's not strictly RDF either - but the RDF community has gone further
down this route, so have had to deal with more of it. To get truly
"automatic" fixes for this class of problem you're right off two jumps
past RDF and into OWL territory.

In practical terms, you can't do this automatically (fully, generally,
and today). You'd need ontological definitions of dimension such as
"length", then you'd need some widespread agreed vocabularies to
define the sets of terms you can understand and work with. Even better
would be a taxonomic and descriptive vocabulary, i.e. one that
expressed the relationship of "12 inches to a foot" and the meaning of
"kilo".

Likelihood is that Dublin Core would be a fertile searching ground for
practical approaches. You're back to a pre-XML world, but one that's
well-established and has needeed robust solutions to such things for a
good while now. I can't remember dimensions work, but geographical
gazeteers and subject indices are very well covered.

One of the most highly developed examples of this work is the units
conversion template [[:template:convert]] at Wikipedia. It's all a
horrible lash-up of wet string and sealing wax, but because these
terms are well-defined and long-term stable, it actually works quite
well.

For XML, then there could be work (but probably not of inspiring
quality) around in the commercial world of ETL, EAI & JMS used to
integrate commercial legacy systems. It's a world of PowerPoint
bullshit in suits though and the thinking is rarely particularly
clever.

You might even find some of the Microformats(!) work to be useful(!!)