On 18/05/2016 12:21, Grahame Grieve wrote:
The main problem is that ucum units are not human readable units,
right - my idea 13 years ago was to use the UCUM string as a key into
something that generated a human-readable form. For reasons that became
clearer since, I think we all agree that we need to embed not just the
formal form, but the human-readable form as well. So that's a fairly
anodyne design problem for the Quantity type in everyone's type system.
I think we can solve that in a reasonable way in openEHR.
and trying to force them to be will generate substantial pushback from
end users. In USA, this is an open problem for CDA adoption. In
Australia, I solved it by declaring that we would never retire valid
ucum units in CDA.
A secondary problem is discrete units like tablet, capsule etc which
have no computable form in ucum
I suspect this is the /main /problem for some people at least these
days. Scientifically speaking, anything like 'tablet', 'capsule', 'drop'
etc isn't a 'unit' in the science/physics sense; but in English (and
most other languages I suspect) we use the same word in a non-science
sense to mean 'discrete amount of anything', e.g. unit shares, 5mg
tablet is the unit of dosing, and so on. This makes people think the
problem can be solved within the model / language of scientific units.
It can't in any clean way.
So dose 'units' need to be understood as something different from
scientific units, and modelled in a different way. They are units of
discretisation or quantisation of material, not units of physical
properties.
- thomas
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