Categories of Information about Devices

This is from an email message on the ont-dev list.

Information to Track: I'm trying to create a single spreadsheet with everything in it, and I am still struggling to track the right information about each variable. To get to the ontology construction stage, I think at a minimum we need:

• Manufacturer
• Model
• Semantic Variable Name
• Connection to Controlled Vocabulary Term

To make it possible to recognize similarities and differences between terms, and to trace terms back to their providers, I think we also need:

• Provider Identifier (your Institution and/or Name)
• Your Local Unique ID for the device
• A globally unique ID for the device (built from previous 2 items)
• Description

A couple of comments:
Why not formalize some optional categories of information now, and see how useful they would be? I'm working on a description of the ASIMet instruments as well as some of our subsurface instruments (mainly Seabird units), and am including sample schemes, lists of synonyms, and sensor types.
Examples: an ASIMet wind module might be carry a sonic wind sensor or a propeller and vane; an sbe37 might be called a microcat or mcat; and the 1-minute data from different ASIMet modules are sampled for different lengths of time, at different times, within the minute. Is this information beyond the scope of the ontology? If it is going to be external, should its presentation be formalized any way?

I'm not sure what you mean by 'local unique id for the device' - you're not talking about an instance of the instrument, right? Do you just mean my description of an asimet wind unit would be nan-whoi-asimetwind?