What's in a number? A lot more than meets the eye, says TrueNumbers

Hypertext has become so ubiquitous that we barely notice any more when a word is highlighted so we can click on it. But the idea of connecting a word to its context, definition, or other material with a hyperlink has become the on-line elaboration of the footnote. Now Allen Razdow, a founder of pioneering interactive mathematics tool MathCAD, is suggesting that we extend the idea once again, to enrich the meaning behind quantities used in Web tools.

Razdow’s idea, Truenumbers, forms the heart of what has been a stealth start-up, True Engineering Technology. The idea, which blends the notions of hypertext, Wikipedia, revision control, Office plug-ins, and automatic unit-conversion calculators, promises to greatly simplify the task of making sure everyone in a project or corporation stays on the same page, quantitatively.

This all requires a little explanation. A quantity in a text document or a spreadsheet actually includes several components, Razdow explained. There are digits, obviously. Equally obviously to engineers, but often forgotten by the untrained, a quantity includes dimension in some defined units, and a tolerance. And in some cases, such as accepted constants in physics or chemistry, the quantity also may have a proper name, like pi or Planck’s constant. Attached to the quantity, either implicitly or explicitly, there is also a description, like minimal channel length or oxide thickness.

Less obviously, the quantity may also have a history. There may not be one unambiguous value associated with a description, or even with a proper name, even inside a particular project group. Some quantities can become more precise as a project progresses, be subject to discussion or dispute, or simply get officially changed from time to time. Ask anyone who tries to maintain a PDK.

Razdow’s idea is to capture all these facets of a quantity in a single repository. The searchable html repository would function as a Wiki, so that all authorized users could access the information and if necessary add to or update it. To track changes to the entries—a serious weakness of many Wikis—the Truenumbers repository includes chronological tracking of entries, so you can see a graphic view of where the current value of the quantity came from, and who submitted it to the registry. You can also find out where some other value came from, if for example you are trying to track down the source of a value different from the one you’ve been using in your calculations.

If Razdow’s idea were just an extended Wiki it would already be useful. But as they say, wait, there’s more. True Engineering also provides a Microsoft Office plug-in that picks up the XML representation of a Truenumber and inserts in its place the proper string to represent the dimensioned quantity in a Word or Excel document. The plug-in also handles unit conversion and insertion, so for instance if your project uses common units and you have to write a report that requires SI units, the conversion gets done. It also supports searching the repository using the Office Research Pane.

True Engineering is maintaining a public repository, or numberspace, as they call it. Razdow encourages area experts to submit numbers that they believe will be generally useful. Presumably, someone with lots of time on their hands is going through the old Chemical Rubber Company Handbook as we speak.

So there’s the promise. By putting Truenumbers instead of plain text into your documents, you get the currently-accepted value, allow your readers to check the source of your numbers, and get a lot of other conveniences. There’s the potential to avoid the kinds of easy errors—such as mistakes in dimension or units—that can be catastrophic to a project.

This has to make business sense as well, of course. True Engineering will sell the servers that support numberspaces and license the Office plug-ins. The expectation is that corporations and project teams will want to have their own private numberspaces to maintain and control the quantities used in their projects. It is these enterprise sales that Razdow is counting on to bring in the revenue.