Units of measurement in ecosystems : Design science research on how to communicate and handle units

Units of measurement are needed in many of today’s software programs and datasets for describing physical concepts. Despite this, there are many issues regarding units of measurement in both code and data, such as inconsistent unit annotations, unit types being difficult to annotate and missing built-in unit support in tools and programming languages. Not least, is there a lack of examples of how to implement safe usage of units of measurement within an entire ecosystem consisting of code programs and data resources. Therefore, this thesis takes a design science approach to explore how a simple ecosystem of interconnected software and data components can be refactored to support safe usage of units of measurement, and whether the given solution shows it is possible to mitigate the burden of having to annotate types within the ecosystem. This has resulted in the development of an artifact that offers read/create, refactor and formatting capabilities, that can be used to implement units of measurement and unit checking into an ecosystem. The findings are that the artifact demonstrates how it is possible to implement safer usage of units, and at the same time being able to avoid the annotation burden to some extent.