Arguments are given in favour of teaching a course of General Metrology in technical universities, and some hints are formulated regarding the content of it. Several questions arise in connection with General Metrology, seen as a technical discipline, rather than a physical one. Is it useful to teach General Metrology as a separate course at a higher education level? If the answer is yes, what would be the best curriculum of such a course? When would it be most appropriate to teach the course, at the beginning or at the end of the series of basic technical disciplines? What are the main benefits such a course would bring to the general formation of the student of a technical university? The paper intends to present some aspects from our experience in this direction, after many years of teaching General Metrology at the University Politehnica of Bucharest, Romania, faculty of Electrotechnics.

In many countries logging is a very important sector of economy, a factor, which led to an extensive industrialization in the field of wood processing within the last three decades. In particular electronic measurement systems are used to optimise the commercial utilization of the resource “timber” and also for data acquisition in trade and commerce. Modern measuring assemblies for round timber enable not only to acquire the volume of round timber but also to record – self-acting - taper, sweep and ovality. More and more efforts are undertaken to use data - primarily attained for internal purposes only and for pricing, respectively. Therefore, the measurement methods presently used should be analyzed and several criteria for measurement of round timber in the future should be discussed and - last but not least - basic requirements on measurement systems as far as the valuation of features of wood is concerned should be identified.

In the educational process of teaching engineers one important part is to bridge the gap between theory (functional principle, model….) and real world (hardware, devices…). By learning e.g. how to use an oscilloscope in a real application the functional principle is accompanied by an evaluation of the measurement results. In our web-based electrical laboratory www.internetlabor.ch the user trains himself how to push the right button on a real oscilloscope by a mouse click via his internet browser. The measured data downloaded subsequently are the product of a real hardware operation based on a real measurement action and not output of a simulation. Web-based instrumentation supports teaching only successfully, if the user understands the basic functional principles of the instruments already to some degree. In addition, the teaching process has to comprise a discussion of the measured data to achieve an understanding of how a reliable measurement result is obtained. Therefore, the electrical internet-laboratory is integrated in a web-based training environment on electrical measurement systems.

EUROMET, the European organisation of National Metrology Institutes, promotes the coordination of metrological activities and services in order to achieve higher efficiency. A key task of EUROMET is to provide the necessary framework to allow for the mutual recognition and acceptance of calibration certificates. This paper describes the objectives, structure and key tasks of EUROMET.

The paper gives a brief introduction to the National Measurement Laboratory (NML), Australia's premier institution for measurement science and technology. A particular emphasis is placed on the role NML plays as a key element in the national standards and conformance infrastructure.