VOUnits next steps

There are no current plans to develop the VOUnits specification. However this page collects a few minor errata and suggestions for future work, which can be addressed if such plans do eventually emerge.

Below is a note of minor fixes already applied (by Norman)

• The list of 'deprecated by FITS' terms in Table 2 is slightly ambiguous. I've adjusted the text in the repository version of the standard, to clarify that these 'deprecations' derive from Table 4 in the FITS spec (which actually says they're deprecated by the IAU but doesn't take a position on the matter itself).

• The besselian and tropical years are not mentioned in that list of FITS-deprecated units -- they appeared by acclaim in the on-list discussions, and so ended up in the VOUnits list. I've removed them from the FITS column in the Unity library (which is what generates the document's Table 2); they're still recognised-but-deprecated in VOUnits.

• The units 'angstrom' and 'ohm' (as unit names) are correctly spelled with a lowercase initial letter, but in both cases their usual unit symbol is a non-ASCII character, so that their all-ASCII version here must be a word. Following the lead of the FITS and CDS standards, and of SI unit-symbols derived from surnames, and disagreeing with the OGIP standard, we have preferred the initial-capital symbol in VOUnits (thus `Angstrom' as the unit symbol, rather than `angstrom').

See volute commit for the document, and unity commit for the library.

-- NormanGray - 2014-10-27