Home MethodologyMeasurements

Bring your own measurements

The ISQ Browser is a standards browser — it publishes the ISO 80000 & IEC 80000 vocabulary and the measurement model, never measurement data itself. Organisations that hold measurements supply them through a simple RDF intake contract, and this site renders them.

The contract

A measurement record is a small RDF graph using the ISQ ontology terms. One file, no API, no schema of our invention — the ontology is the format.

Predicate	Object	Meaning
a	isq:MeasuredQuantity	The measurement result — Qm = {Q}·[Q]; subclass of isq:QuantityInstantiation.
isq:measurementOf	→ isq:QuantityInstantiation	The particular quantity that was measured (required, exactly one).
isq:hasValue	xsd:decimal	The numerical value {Q} (required, exactly one).
isq:hasUnit	→ isq:Unit	The unit [Q] (required, exactly one).
isq:uncertainty	xsd:decimal	Expanded uncertainty U, per GUM (optional).
isq:measuredAt	xsd:dateTime	When the measurement was performed (optional).

The intake path

Provide a Turtle file using the isq: terms above — see the worked example for a complete graph (rod, length of rod, instantiation, measured result with uncertainty).
Extend browser/public/ontologies/ with the file (a downstream deployment can add it at build time; no code changes are needed).
The ontology plugin extracts every new individual automatically: it gets a detail page with its Assertions and Values, RDF exports, and appears in the measurements index.

Note: the browser does not validate measurement quality or provenance — that remains the data provider's responsibility (instrument, procedure, and operator metadata can be attached using the same RDF approach, e.g. prov: or smart:Activity).

Why a contract, not content

Measurement data is inherently third-party: it belongs to laboratories, registries, and industry. Bundling measurements here would blur the line between the standard and its application — precisely the boundary Pendrill (2024) draws at level 3. The contract keeps that boundary clean: the standard defines the quantities, the ontology defines the measurement structure, and whoever measures owns the results.