[okfn-labs] Units protocol

[Andrew Berkeley]

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