On 19/12/12 12:23, Daniel Kinzler wrote:
On 19.12.2012 08:34, Nikola Smolenski wrote:
What I wanted to say. Additionally, in some cases historical units are not accurate or accurately known, so possibly we won't even be able to make the conversion.
I don't think we can sensibly support historical units with unknown conversions, because they cannot be compared directly to SI units. So, they couldn't be used to answer queries, can't be converted for display, etc - they arn't units in any sense the software can understand. This is a solvable problem, but would add a tremendous amount of complexity.
Ah, but they could still be meaningfully compared to each other. And if approximate conversion is known, this could be still be used to make the conversion so that the measure is converted and its uncertainty increased.
Just throwing more info here: there might also be cases where we could have multiple competing conversions. Somewhat similar to units, something that I would very much like to see is comparison of various monetary values, adjusted for inflation or exchange rate. But then you would have various estimates of inflation by various bodies and you might want to compare by either of them (or a combination of them?).