Advancing Scientific Terminology & Standards for the Digital Era—DUST Conference 2025

Colin L. Bird; Agnes Jasinska; Jeremy G. Frey

doi:10.1515/ci-2025-0435

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Advancing Scientific Terminology & Standards for the Digital Era—DUST Conference 2025

Colin L. Bird , Agnes Jasinska and Jeremy G. Frey

Published/Copyright: October 29, 2025

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From the journal Chemistry International Volume 47 Issue 4

The Units, Symbols, and Terminology in the Physical Sciences in and for the Digital Era (D-UST) Conference 2025 took place on 13–14 March 2025 at the Royal Society of Chemistry in London. Co-organized by IUPAC, CODATA, the Physical Sciences Data Infrastructure (PSDI) project, and hosted by the Royal Society of Chemistry, the conference brought together an international cohort of scientists, data experts, philosophers, and policy makers to address a common goal: ensuring scientific terminology, units, and symbols are fit for purpose in a predominantly digital and interdisciplinary research landscape.

The conference focused on harmonizing scientific expression across digital platforms, enhancing machine-readability, and supporting data interoperability—key enablers for FAIR data practices and global collaboration. The programme featured expert-led sessions, interactive project tables, the IUPAC Green and Gold books, and in-depth discussion on emerging challenges and technologies.

Key highlights included:

Vanessa Seifert (Universities of Bristol & Athens) explored the implications of artificial intelligence on scientific progress, questioning how opacity in AI systems challenges traditional scientific virtues such as explanation, prediction, and truth.
Blair Hall (Measurement Standards Laboratory of New Zealand) introduced the M-layer, a novel framework enabling unambiguous expression and transformation of measurement data by linking quantitative values to defined aspects and scales.
Cerys Willoughby (University of Southampton) presented user-experience research on improving metadata practices in electronic lab notebooks, emphasizing cognitive prompting techniques to enhance data quality and reusability.
György Gyomai (OECD) examined the organisation of data using counting-units, proposing nuanced approaches for treating discrete quantities—such as population data—within measurement systems.
Philip Dunn (LGC Group) provided a critical overview of ongoing IUPAC projects on isotopic analysis, highlighting inconsistencies in symbols, legacy definitions, and the importance of clear guidance for data comparability.
Joseph Wright (University of East Anglia) illustrated the practical challenges of Unicode symbol representation in scientific computing, advocating for coordinated community input to encoding new concepts.
Simon Coles (University of Southampton) offered a crystallographer’s perspective on FAIR data, detailing how information frameworks like CIF have supported reproducibility and transparency.
Samantha Pearman-Kanza (University of Southampton) provided a pragmatic perspective on the Semantic Web, encouraging the use of modular, standards-based ontologies for scientific data exchange.

Parallel sessions included strategic planning for the Digital Green Book, updates on the Gold Book revision, exploration of CODATA’s Cross Domain Interoperability Framework (CDIF), and discussions on digital tools for PSDI to support unit representation and metadata interoperability.

The conference reaffirmed IUPAC’s leadership in standardising terminology and underlined the need for ongoing collaboration across scientific domains, policy-making, and data infrastructure initiatives. Attendees agreed on the urgency of creating durable, scalable digital frameworks that balance human understanding with machine readability.

In closing, Professor Jeremy Frey (University of Southampton) emphasized the value of interdisciplinary dialogue and philosophical insight in guiding future developments. Discussions at D-UST 2025 are expected to catalyse new partnerships and contribute meaningfully to the ongoing work by PSDI, CODATA/DRUM and IUPAC in supporting open, accurate, and interoperable science.

The talks can be found at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2AmpX9OaGUQ

The timestamps for the different talks are :

2:46 - Chemical progress in the age of AI - Vanessa A. Seifert*

45:47 - Stuff we don’t know we know: unpacking tacit assumptions about the semantics of units and dimensions - Blair Hall

1:34:40 - Human aspects of Units, Symbols, Terminology - Cerys Willoughby

2:18:00 - Counting Units, are they different from first class units? - Gyorgy Gyomai

2:53:10 - 3rd time lucky - past and current IUPAC projects on terminology for isotopic analyses - Phil Dunn

3:18:09 - Unicode for Scientific Symbols - Joseph Wright

3:34:51 - IUPAC, UNDRR/ISC Hazard Information Profiles and Disaster Risk Reduction - Virginia Murray

3:53:46 - RSC-IUPAC Committee - Andrew Shore

4:06:00 - FAIR Data Standards - A Crystallographers Perspective - Simon Coles

4:42:53 - A Pragmatic view of the Semantic Web for the Physical Sciences - Samantha Pearman-Kanza

5:21:40 - Information on the digital Green Book and how to represent units and systems - Stuart Chalk

5:55:53 - Where next for DRUM, CDIF and WorldFAIR+? - Simon Hodson

6:26:15 - Discussion round: Units and Names

The presentations can be found at https://www.psdi.ac.uk/dust/

A version of this report is published in the newsletter of CICAG, the Chemical Information and Computer Applications interest group of the Royal Society of Chemistry, RSC CICAG Distillate—Summer 2025, page 8, rsccicag.org

*See Vanessa Seifert short feature in this issue of Chem Int, page 20

https://iupac.org/event/units-symbols-and-terminology-in-the-physical-sciences-in-and-for-the-digital-era/

Published Online: 2025-10-29

Published in Print: 2025-10-01

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

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