simphony / simphony-metadata

[LEGACY] This repository contains the metadata definitions used in SimPhoNy project.
BSD 2-Clause "Simplified" License
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Units should be defined explicitly #127

Open stefanoborini opened 7 years ago

stefanoborini commented 7 years ago

After the discussion about units, it is probably important to remember the following: data models generally do not focus on implementing every possible option. What they do is instead choose one standard unit for internal storage, and use that.

Meaning: we don't need a unit ontology, or to express e.g. MASS as an entity that has both a value and a unit. We just need to say that MASS is a value of mass in kilograms. If we want a different unit, it is generally because it is relevant to a specific field (e.g. mass in atomic units is called atomic mass unit and values are expressed as such, e.g. 13 amu)