Authoring and publishing units and quantities in semantic documents

Abstract

This paper shows how an explicit representation of units and quantities can improve the experience of semantically published documents, and provides a first authoring method in this respect. To exemplify the potential and practical advantages of encoding explicit semantics regarding units w.r.t. user experience, we demonstrate a unit system preference service, which enables the user to choose the system of units for the displayed paper. By semantically publishing units, we obtain a basis for a wide range of applications and services such as unknown unit lookup, unit and quantity semantic search and unit and quantity manipulation. Enabling semantic publishing for units is also presented in the context of a large collection of legacy scientific documents (the arXMliv corpus), where our approach allows to non-invasively enrich legacy publications. © 2012 Springer-Verlag.