If that were a delivery date, the room for confusion would be critical. And here's another measure of time - 19860228. Or 1986, February 28. We get accustomed to one system of notation, or even two, but new users can be quite puzzled by them. These are the kinds of problems that arise from context, and Madnick's research is focused on ways of dealing with such problems, not only for electronic commerce but for other business realms as well.
Standardization is one obvious way of approaching the problem.
And the traditional approach of building hand-crafted translators simply doesn't scale up properly to hundreds of thousands, or to millions of interoperating agents. We need to look for something more automatic. So that, if you're asking which ski areas have more than five feet of snow, you get an answer to that question in the form you asked it, rather than being given answers in every unit of measure except feet. Madnick's research into this area is being done in three parts. The first part involves a number of transportation firms and government agencies and is focused on understanding the nature of these problems, where they come from, and how they occur.