Technical and cultural contexts for measurement systems

This chapter aims to outline the technical and cultural contexts in which measurement systems, as presented in the previous chapter, are designed, set up, and operated. It first introduces the basic proposal that a measurement should produce as result not only one or more values of the property under consideration but also some information on the quality of those values, and discusses the consequences in terms of measurement uncertainty. This proposal is then embedded in the broader context of metrological systems, which help justify the societal significance of measurement results via their traceability to conventionally determined measurement units, so that measurement results can be interpreted in the same way by different persons in different places and times. Finally, we consider the issue of what is measured, i.e., the property of an object, or measurand, which must be somehow defined and identified, an act that is not necessarily related to assigning measurement values. On this basis, the chapters that follow develop and bring further specificity to our analysis and proposals. As with the previous chapter, we believe that the contents of this chapter should be sufficiently uncontroversial to be read and accepted by most, if not all, researchers and practitioners.