Measure microformat research
This page is for researching and developing a measure microformat. Per the process:
The problem
Measures (e.g. weights, sizes, temperatures) occur frequently on the Web, they are constituted of a value a unit-measure and, in scientific and technical contexts, an experimental uncertainty. These 3 elements should be marked-up consistently across websites so that they can be easily identified and acted upon (export, compute, convert) in collaborative distributed applications.
Unit-measures differ from locale to locale (e.g. Fahrenheit vs. Celsius, pound versus Kilogram), making comparison and matching of offerings difficult.
The Measurement microformat will enable unambiguous description of physical quantities and thus provide a solid ground for data sharing and automation in many areas.
Next Steps
- clean-up measure-examples to refer to current real world examples
- update measure-formats with formats from other recent efforts such as schema.org
- massive clean-up of measure-brainstorming
Related microformats
- hcalendar can provide a complete quantitative description of a natural event (for example an earthquake) occurring at a specified time (dtstart/dtend) and location (embedded geo), by just embedding measured physical quantities in the 'descrition' span.
- job-listing can use time measure for specify per what period of time the salary is for.
- hlisting product dimensions; weight/mass; time period (as above); price.
- directions-examples can use length measure for mileage and time to go from one point to the next.
- recipe-examples can use weight, volume and time measure for ingredients and preparation time.
- currency can be viewed as a measurement unit, or as a component of a measurement unit, as in $ per hour.
References
- Measurement in scientific/technical contexts (Wikipedia)
- Scientific notation for Physical quantities (Wikipedia)
- International System of Units (SI)
- the Semantic ChemicalWeb (GoogleEng presentation, Peter Murray-Rust)
- the New e-Science (SlideShare, David De Roure)
- Wikipedia's "convert" template
- Jukka Korpela - Characters in SI notations