How should international value differences (like sizing) be accounted for?

[grokwich]

This issue could apply in general to the meaning of a value that differs across countries.

My concrete example is Shoe Sizes (gid://shopify/Taxonomy/Attribute/87).

Example:
If shoe size of 10 (gid://shopify/Taxonomy/Value/2880) is interpreted differently across US, EU, UK, AU,... should they all have the same semantic value?

It starts getting complicated. Some options.

1. ignore the issue ("10" is always independent of any other context)?
2. each country/size has it's own unique code (ie. "EU/10" and "US/10" would be different attributes)?
3. if the issue is important for a usecase, then combining some form of country code, or locale value to these cases might work (ie. "EU" + "10" vs. "US" + "10")?

thx.

[grokwich]

FYI, looks like the google taxonomy has a generalized concept of "Size System", which account for different ways of expressing size ranges (by Country, or any other reason)...
https://support.google.com/merchants/answer/6324502?hl=en&ref_topic=6324338&sjid=1365582800358957231-NA

[grokwich]

Now that i realize that the Shopify taxonomy is a subset of Google's Product Categories/Attributes, is there any reason why the GPC is not adopted, rather than re-invent?

If you wanted to extend the GPC, at least that would allow merchants to only need classification for their Products using one system (Shopify) that could be mapped to GPC.

But there are so many differences, that mapping is unlikely to be practical.

What is the benefit for merchants having to maintain metadata for multiple taxonomies?