The Annotation of Measure Expressions in ISO Standards

In annotating measure expressions such as three days and about 123 km, two recently published ISO standards, ISO-TimeML (ISO, 2012b) and ISOspace (ISO, 2014a), show some inconsistencies, as pointed out in ISO SemAF Principles (ISO, 2014c), a third ISO standards on semantic annotation to be published soon. Other than terminological or semantic inconsistencies introduced in ISO SemAF Principles, there are some formal inconsistencies between or within these standards. This paper attempts to resolve such inconsistencies by proposing some minimally possible modifications into the annotation schemes of those two standards. Despite these modifications, the interoperability between these standards is preserved, each retaining its own annotation scheme for either temporal or spatial information involving measures. An attempt is also made to partially merge ISO-TimeML and ISOspace as a step towards the integration of ISO SemAF standards into a modularly usable general annotation scheme for the semantic annotation of language.