Hi Joel and Gregor,

This is exactly the type of issue being addressed by observation models in the SONet and TDWG Observations groups.  Existing observations models (e.g., OBOE, O+M, etc) do provide the ability to use terms from OWL vocabularies for the entity being measured and the measured characteristics as well as for units, value space domains, and a variety of other salient components of the observations.  I think there's a lot of potential for crosswalking these with characters described in EQ and SDD.  If you're interested in the observations work, you might be interested in the slides and some of the background material that we prepared about the ways in which different observational data models work and how they serialize observational data, which are listed on the agenda from the last TDWG Observations meeting: 
  https://sonet.ecoinformatics.org/workshops/tdwg-2010-meeting

These models address exactly the case described, but they don't try to put complex, multidimensional data relations into a single flat structure as is proposed using the subscripts shown here.

Observational data modeling work is discussed on the open mailing list 'obs@ecoinformatics.org' if you want to join in the discussion (subscribe at http://lists.nceas.ucsb.edu/ecoinformatics/mailman/listinfo/obs).

Cheers,
Matt

On Wed, Jan 5, 2011 at 12:22 PM, Gregor Hagedorn <g.m.hagedorn@gmail.com> wrote:
> Couldn't this be addressed using subscripts? E.g.
> MeasurementID_1="tail length"
> MeasurementID_2="brain volume"
> MeasurementUnit_1="cm"
> MeasurementUnit_2="cubic cm"
> MeasurementValue_1="9"
> MeasurementValue_2="8"

I have no problems with pragmatism, but why are the characters not RDF
concepts itself? I believe they should be rdf vocabularies for those
who want to reason on them.

One more problem: the states can be polymorphic, as in

> MeasurementID_1="flower color"
> MeasurementValue_1="red"
> MeasurementValue_1="orange"

Gregor
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