VOUnits 1.0 RFC - EXTENSION 2013 December 24 -- 2014 January 31 (dates TBC)

The last VOUnits RFC implied a small collection of document and implementation changes which, it turned out, were more far-reaching than was immediately apparent. As well, some new participants appeared in the discussion at this point. The result is a set of document and syntax changes which, it has been decided, are substantial enough to warrant a new RFC.

The main visible changes in the new version are

• the appearance of 'quoted units', thus permitting for example km/'martianDay' (see the document for discussion; this was the principal syntactic change which ended up necessitating the new version)
• recognition for unknown functions, so that for example dBA(ct/s) includes an unknown function dBA
• the appearance of binary prefixes (Ki, Mi, ...) on certain units
• more explicit statements that the indication that units are unknown is the special string unknown, and that the indication that a quantity is dimensionless is that the units string is the empty string
• various document clarifications

The editors believe we have accommodated or acknowledged each of the concerns on the original RFC page, either in the document or on that page. Please feel free to disagree.

We do not believe these are deep changes in principle, so those WG chairs who were happy with the document in its previous incarnation may not need to examine it too closely this time.

Changes are reported in the appendix Update sections of the new version of this proposed recommendation, available below.

Comments from all working groups members are welcome. The review will run for (a little more than) four weeks, to 2014 January 31.

For comparison and reminder, all comments from the previous iteration are available on the former VOUnitsRFC page.

#All WG Review

Comments

Applications WG (MarkTaylor, PierreFernique)

Data Access Layer WG (PatrickDowler, FrancoisBonnarel)

Data Model WG (JesusSalgado, OmarLaurino)

Grid and Web Sevices WG (AndreSchaaff, AndreasWicenec)

Registry WG (GretchenGreene, PierreLeSidaner)

Semantics WG (NormanGray, MireilleLouys)

Data Curation & Preservation IG (AlbertoAccomazzi, FrancoiseGenova)

Education IG (MassimoRamella, SudhanshuBarway)

Knowledge Discovery in Databases IG (GeorgeDjorgovski)

Theory IG (FranckLePetit, RickWagner)

Time Domain IG (JohnSwinbank, MikeFitzpatrick)

Comments from TCG (WG and IG chairs)

• PR-VOUnits-1.0-20131025.pdf: Recommendation for Units strings in the virtual Observatory -UPDATE

• PR-VOUnits-1.0-20131224.pdf: PR 1.0-20131224