search

NCEAS / eml

Ecological Metadata Language (EML)
https://eml.ecoinformatics.org/
GNU General Public License v2.0
40 stars 15 forks source link

missing or erroneous SI units in unitDictionary #139

Closed mbjones closed 6 years ago

mbjones commented 7 years ago

Author Name: Margaret O'Brien (Margaret O'Brien) Original Redmine Issue: 1605, https://projects.ecoinformatics.org/ecoinfo/issues/1605 Original Date: 2004-06-16 Original Assignee: Matt Jones

  1. The SI-derived unit "steradian" (sr) appears to be missing. it describes a solid angle, and is the 3-dimensional equivalent of "radian". I dont believe it can be described in terms of any other unit.

  2. the "waveNumber" unit is more correctly called reciprocalMeter (m-1), and waveNumber is one of the measurements expressed by this unit (ie, waveNumber=the number of wave cycles in 1 meter). Other measurements which are expressed in m-1 include absorbance, scattering and transmittance.

  3. the unit "kilogramPerCubicMeter" is named inconsistently. It seems that it should be plural, ie kilogramsPerCubicMeter. This is consistent with other unit names (milligramsPerCubicMeter) and also how it is referenced as a ParentSI attribute.

mbjones commented 7 years ago

Original Redmine Comment Author Name: Matt Jones (Matt Jones) Original Date: 2004-06-22T19:53:36Z

Thanks for the comments. I'm not sure that renaming units is a great idea because it strands existing EML documents that use those units. That said, your comments do indicate a need for more consistent naming. I'll target this at EML 2.1.0 and hope we can resolve these issues along with other 'units repository' issues as partially described in bug 1000 and on the eml-dev mailing list archives.

mbjones commented 7 years ago

Original Redmine Comment Author Name: Matt Jones (Matt Jones) Original Date: 2004-09-02T16:38:20Z

Changing QA contact to the list for all current EML bugs so that people can track what is happening.

mbjones commented 7 years ago

Original Redmine Comment Author Name: Redmine Admin (Redmine Admin) Original Date: 2013-03-27T21:17:40Z

Original Bugzilla ID was 1605

mbjones commented 7 years ago

Original Redmine Comment Author Name: Matt Jones (Matt Jones) Original Date: 2014-10-14T22:45:16Z

Status update: The unit naming inconsistency described in this bug was not fixed in EML 2.1.1 in order to maintain backwards compatibility. In general, we deemed that the names were not critical because they map to a precise STMML definition, so it is trivial to determine if two units are identical. Therefore, we don't plan on removing units with names that deviate from the naming convention. But there would be no harm in adding new units that are named following the conventions and provide a duplicate unit. There hasn't been a major request for this yet. Nor has there been a major need for additional units as people can define their own units in STMML.

mobb commented 6 years ago

done, deprecated