COMMONS11 — Several OMG task forces have a need for a common ontology for quantities and units

A preliminary quantities and units ontology was developed for FIBO for use with commodities. Several other groups at OMG need this ontology, as do external users of the Commons library. The ontology should be mappable to the SysML v2 library so that we can generate the individuals in that library for use in knowledge graph applications. It should also be consistent, to the degree possible, with the latest changes to the VIM, with BIPM requirements, and with ISO 11240 for use in the pharmaceutical domain.

There is a dependency in the quantities and units ontology on a small documents ontology, to provide the reference documentation for certain units. This ontology is relatively small, however, and can easily be mapped to other ontologies defining documents.

Introduce two new ontologies, a documents ontology and a quantities and units ontology that depends on it

Several OMG task forces and other external industry groups in pharmaceuticals, manufacturing, finance and others, there is a widely recognized need for a well-designed ontology supporting quantities and units. While a number of ontologies exist that claim to fill this gap, few are well designed and some have moved away from OWL in order to meet other demands. Within OMG, the healthcare, finance, robotics, and retail task forces all have requirements for a quantities and units ontology. Given the latest advances in SysML, such an ontology should align well with the library of quantities and units in SysML v2 so that the equivalent reference content in RDF/OWL can be automatically generated.

The ontologies included in this resolution fill that need, although they are limited to scalar quantities at this juncture. The RTF intends to create a new arrays / vectors / tensors ontology and a companion quantities and units extension to support tensor and vector quantities over the coming months. Most applications do not need that level of sophistication however, and thus the RTF has determined that submission of the scalar version should happen sooner than later to fulfill requirements of other task forces.