John TImmer's article Crowdsourcing the semantics of numbers with True # at ArsTechnica talks about True#, which is looking to put context around numbers that are represented as text. A very interesting idea.

From ArsTechnica:

"… Most of us can probably recognize 3.14159 and the conceptual baggage it carries, but how many of us would recognize 58.44? (That's a mole of sodium chloride, in grams, for the curious.) And the response that would work for words—look it up—doesn't work so conveniently for numbers …"

From True#'s site:

"Plain text numbers are hard to format, unreliable, and not machine-readable. Truenumbers™ are a dedicated technology for representing numbers that achieve new levels of engineering productivity, accuracy and auditability. Truenumbers are better numbers."