Semantic Units for Scientific Data Exchange

All practical scientific research and development relies inherently on a well-understood framework of quantities and units. While at first sight it appears that potential issues should by now be well understood, closer investigation reveals that there are still many potential pitfalls. There are a number of well-publicised case studies where lack of attention to units by both humans and machines have resulted in significant problems. The same potential problems exist for all e-Science applications whenever data is exchanged between different systems; an unambiguous definition of the units is essential to data exchange. E-science applications must be able to import and export scientific data accurately and without any necessity for human interaction. This paper discusses the progress we have made in establishing such a capability and demonstrates it with prototype software and a small but varied library of units.