Abstract
As an independent scientific discipline, metrology needs its own terminological dictionary. Beginning from 1984, ISO has published three editions of the International Vocabulary of Metrology (VIM). The first such dictionary – “International Vocabulary of Basic and General Terms in Metrology” appeared in 1984. In 1993 came out the second edition of this document, and in 2007 the third (and current) edition. All three editions were prepared under the auspices of BIPM. The third edition has a new name – “International Vocabulary of Metrology – Basic and General Concepts and Associated Terms (VIM)” [1] – in order to stress the fundamental differences from the prior editions. The new VIM indeed differs significantly from the previous ones. Instead of the traditional philosophical foundations of metrology the new VIM adopts the philosophy of the “Guide to the Expression of Uncertainty in Measurement (GUM)” – the document prepared under the auspices of BIPM and published by ISO in 1995 [2]. This philosophy was named in VIM the “uncertainty approach”.
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Notes
- 1.
Indeed, the reader would note that this terminology, which separates the terms error and uncertainty, is followed in the present book.
- 2.
Recall from Sect. 3.6 that by reliability of an estimate we mean an indication of how much different estimates, obtained from different samples of observations, can differ from each other.
- 3.
Note that while we in this book have also transitioned from traditional theory of measurements to what we call physical theory, our change retains the concepts of true value of a measurand or measurement error, and does not substitute standard deviation for measurement accuracy indicator. Our physical theory avoids the use of Taylor series and thus increased accuracy of estimating measurement uncertainty, as well as solves two fundamental problems in theory of measurement: constructing confidence intervals for indirect measurements and universal method for combining systematic and random components of measurement error. The uncertainty approach introduced by VIM and GUM does not solve new problems, and – as we show in this chapter – produced some incorrect methods.
References
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Rabinovich, S.G. (2013). The International Vocabulary of Metrology and the Guide to the Expression of Uncertainty in Measurement: Analysis, Criticism, and Recommendations. In: Evaluating Measurement Accuracy. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-6717-5_9
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