Tuesday at NCSLI in Kansas City, Technical Session 2e — Digitalization/AI in Metrology — Mark Kuster presents The MII: Current Status and Future Directions. That's when the measurand taxonomy catalog gets its public moment. And they're putting a link on the screen that I built:

I'm not on the taxonomy committee. I'm not a metrology standards guy. I run a calibration lab. Last year I sat in a room where people smarter than me were talking about AI and clean measurement data, and they were showing a GitHub repository.

GitHub is great for changelogs, for working together, for holding the source of truth. It is not how a normal person reads a taxonomy. I looked around that room and thought: I don't know if half these people know what this actually is, how to use it, or how to browse it. The hard part wasn't building the data. The hard part was adoption. And you don't get adoption from a folder of XML.

So I opened Cursor, pointed it at the repo, and built a quick frontend while the session was still going. Browse. Search. Something a human could open without cloning anything.

When it ended I found Michael Schwartz — Metrology.NET, Cal Lab Solutions, one of the people pushing this work — and showed him. He asked when I built it. I said during the session. He invited me to the weekly meeting even though I wasn't really working on the taxonomy. I've been tinkering with the site for about twelve months since: sync from the Git source, revision history, an API that still needs real help. The bones were always the same idea. Make the work readable.

That's the whole story. A group of people — NCSLI's 141 MII committee, NIST-adjacent digitalization work, Schwartz, Ryan White at NRC Canada, Mark Kuster chairing the thing — have been building a machine-readable language for what we measure, so software can actually use calibration data instead of guessing from free text. They're right. Cleaner data is not optional if AI is going to mean anything in a lab.

What they were missing, at least in that room last year, was the front door.

I'm not claiming I invented the taxonomy. I built the thing that lets someone click around it. Tuesday, that door gets shown in the talk. If you're in Chouteau B from 3:00 to 4:30, you'll see the session — Juris Meija, then Ryan White, then Kuster. If you're not, the link works from wherever you are.

I drive the ideas. The tools drive the doing. This one just happened to happen in a conference seat.

They're Putting My Link on the Screen