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From the perspectives of architecture, comparison and reuse, the purpose of this paper is to provide a comprehensive survey on four mainstream units ontologies: quantity-unit-dimension-type, quantities, units, dimensions and values, ontology of units of measure and units ontology (UO) of the open biomedical ontologies, in order to address well the state of the art and the reuse strategies of the UO.<\/jats:p><\/jats:sec><jats:sec><jats:title content-type=\"abstract-subheading\">Design\/methodology\/approach<\/jats:title><jats:p>An architecture of units ontologies is presented, in which the relations between key factors (i.e. units of measure, quantity and dimension) are discussed. The criteria for comparing units ontologies are developed from the perspectives of organizational structure, pattern design and application scenario. Then, the authors compare four typical units ontologies based on the proposed comparison criteria. Furthermore, how to reuse these units ontologies is discussed in materials science domain by utilizing two reuse strategies of partial reference and complete reference.<\/jats:p><\/jats:sec><jats:sec><jats:title content-type=\"abstract-subheading\">Findings<\/jats:title><jats:p>Units ontologies have attracted high attention in the scientific domain. Based on the comparison of four popular units ontologies, this paper finds that different units ontologies have different design features from the perspectives of basis structure, units conversion and axioms design; a UO is better to be applied to the application areas that satisfy its design features; and many challenges remain to be done in the future research of the UO.<\/jats:p><\/jats:sec><jats:sec><jats:title content-type=\"abstract-subheading\">Originality\/value<\/jats:title><jats:p>This paper makes an extensive review on units ontologies, by defining the comparison criteria and discussing the reuse strategies in the materials domain. Based on this investigation, guidelines are summarized for the selection and reuse of units ontologies.<\/jats:p><\/jats:sec>","DOI":"10.1108\/prog-08-2015-0056","type":"journal-article","created":{"date-parts":[[2017,5,19]],"date-time":"2017-05-19T07:14:22Z","timestamp":1495178062000},"page":"193-213","source":"Crossref","is-referenced-by-count":8,"title":["A survey on units ontologies: architecture, comparison and reuse"],"prefix":"10.1108","volume":"51","author":[{"given":"Xiaoming","family":"Zhang","sequence":"first","affiliation":[],"role":[{"role":"author","vocabulary":"crossref"}]},{"given":"Kai","family":"Li","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[],"role":[{"role":"author","vocabulary":"crossref"}]},{"given":"Chongchong","family":"Zhao","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[],"role":[{"role":"author","vocabulary":"crossref"}]},{"given":"Dongyu","family":"Pan","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[],"role":[{"role":"author","vocabulary":"crossref"}]}],"member":"140","reference":[{"issue":"9","key":"key2020120620574897700_ref001","first-page":"54","article-title":"Materials ontology: an infrastructure for exchanging materials information and knowledge","volume":"9","year":"2010","journal-title":"Data Science Journal"},{"issue":"3","key":"key2020120620574897700_ref002","first-page":"22","article-title":"Context-dependent views to axioms and consequences of semantic web ontologies","volume":"12-13","year":"2012","journal-title":"Web Semantics: Science, Services and Agents on the World Wide Web"},{"issue":"1","key":"key2020120620574897700_ref003","first-page":"1","article-title":"Towards exergaming commons: composing the exergame ontology for publishing open game data","volume":"7","year":"2016","journal-title":"Journal of Biomedical Semantics"},{"key":"key2020120620574897700_ref004","unstructured":"Bechhofer, S., Harmelen, F.V., Hendler, J., Horrocks, I., Mcguinness, D.L., Patel-Schneider, P.F. and Stein, L.A. 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