This is the description of an internship proposal for students pursuing a Master degree (or engineering degree) in computer science and who would like to work in a research environment.
Physical quantities form an important part of what is represented in scientific data, medical data, industry data, open data, and to some extent, various private data.
Whether it is distances, speeds, payloads in transportation, concentrations, masses, moles in chemistry, powers, intensities, voltages in the energy sector, dimensions of furniture, weights, heights of people, durations, and many others in health, there is a need to represent physical quantities, to store them, to process them, and to exchange them between information systems, potentially on a global scale, often on the Internet and via the Web.
In this internship, we seek to precisely define a way to unambiguously represent physical quantities for the Web of Data. More precisely, we will study the proposals made to encode physical quantities in the standard data model of the Semantic Web, RDF. We will be particularly interested in the use of a data type dedicated to this encoding, probably adapted from the proposal of Lefrançois & Zimmermann (2018) based on the UCUM standard.
Having established a rigorous definition of the data type (possibly its variants, if relevant), we will focus on implementing a module that can read/write and process physical quantities and their operations within the RDF data manipulation APIs, for the management, querying and reasoning with knowledge graphs containing physical quantities.
The ambition is that, on the one hand, the specification will become in a few years a de facto standard, before perhaps becoming a de jure standard; and that, on the other hand, the implementation will be the reference allowing to compare the compliance levels of other future implementations.
This study should lead to the publication of a scientific paper in a high impact scientific journal.
antoine.zimmermann@emse.fr and maxime.lefrancois@emse.fr)