[okfn-labs] Units protocol

Sun Jun 2 09:04:23 UTC 2013

In the U.S. the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has been working on UnitsML (http://unitsml.nist.gov).  This is a standard XML representation of units and quantities that is currently being balloted through OASIS  (https://www.oasis-open.org).  Having been involved in the development of UnitsML I would suggest taking a long hard look at this as it is very well thought out and will be used in web services NIST develops in the future.

Stuart Chalk, Ph.D.
Associate Professor of Chemistry
Department of Chemistry, Building 50, Room 3514,
University of North Florida
1 UNF Drive, Jacksonville, FL 32224 USA
P: 904-620-1938
F: 904-620-3535
E: schalk at unf.edu<mailto:schalk at unf.edu>
W: http://www.unf.edu/coas/chemistry/

On Jun 2, 2013, at 2:27 AM, Donald McLean <dmclean62 at gmail.com<mailto:dmclean62 at gmail.com>> wrote:

What about the binary prefixes?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binary_prefix

On Fri, May 31, 2013 at 7:14 PM, Andrew Berkeley <andrew.berkeley.is at googlemail.com<mailto:andrew.berkeley.is at googlemail.com>> wrote:
Hello all,

I thought this would be a good place to flag up a tentative new data protocol for describing physical units.

It is described here here: http://www.dataprotocols.org/en/latest/units.html and was motivated by this conversation with Rufus Pollock and James Smith https://github.com/dataprotocols/dataprotocols/issues/35#issuecomment-18101347

Having a standard way to describe physical quantities (i.e. a number with a unit) is a good thing, not least that it might encourage people to systematically qualify their numbers with units and may also help to disambiguate confusing units (e.g. ton, tonne).

Probably the greatest benefit in my eyes though is the ability to be able to produce machine readable data which can be processed irrespective of using a variety of units. A decent client library would be able to convert/standardize such data and perform any required operations if the units are described consistently and predictably. I've tried to write such a thing for Ruby and have made a start on a similar JS library.

Really, the 2 main points in the protocol are (1) a unique reference for each supported unit, and (2) a standard way of describing compound units (i.e. combinations of units).

Any comments on, suggestions or contributions to the suggested protocol would be very welcome.

Cheers

Andrew
@spatchcockable

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