OWL ontology for unit

[Roy Williams]

Ed

Last October, I spent a day in Edinburgh with the ontology experts and some
VO types. Those people recommended a tool called Oil-Ed
(http://oiled.man.ac.uk/index.shtml), which has the same sort of GUI as
Protege.

There were a lot of words: eg Classes, Forms, Instances, Slots, Facets,
Forms, things that I grasped only in a weak sense. I didn't understand what
there is in VO that would appropriately fit into the ontology model.

I look forward to checking out Ed's units ontology. Maybe this will show me
how it is done.

I have a sense that the UCD work could lead to this sort of "encoded
knowledge". A vocabulary not as complex as natural language, yet not as
rigid as a data model. When combined with the names of table columns, there
is a rich set of things that can be said ("names err_xx, err_xy, err_yy are
examples of "error", and they represent and error ellipse on names x and
y").

Roy

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Caltech Center for Advanced Computing Research
roy at cacr.caltech.edu
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