unitDictionay additions made should we do a supplemental release?

[David Blankman]

Prior to the release of eml 2.0.0 we discussed adding numberPerLiter and 
numberPerMillilter to the unitDictionary. Somehow this was not done. I 
sent an email to the LTER information managers requesting that they 
review the unitDictionary to see if there are any other units that ought 
to be in the dictionary.

I have added these two units to the unitDictionary in cvs.

In previous discussions, we agreed on a policy that the unitDictionary 
could be updated independently of a full eml maintenance release. While 
we had talked about the idea in principle, Matt reminded me that it is 
not that simple, because currently the unitDictionary items are embedded 
in eml-attribute.xsd as enumerations. This means that additions to the 
unitDictionary.xml without a modification of eml-attribute.xsd is 
relatively meaningless.

Adding units to the unitDictionary has two parts, one easy, one more 
challenging.

*First, the easy one*--what is the procedure/policy for adding units?

*Proposed procedure:*
1. Someone from the ecoinformatics community sees the need for a new unit.
2. That person enters a bugzilla bug.
3. Someone from eml-dev enters the new unit and updates 
unitDictionary.xml in cvs.
4. That person requests a vote from the eml-dev group on the inclusion 
of the new unit.

*Second, the thornier issue.* What is the mechanism for distributing the 
change?
Matt brought up the idea of decoupling the unitDictionary from EML, that 
is, removing the enumerations from eml-access.xsd. To do this would 
require a new process for validating the units. One possibility is 
adding a feature to the emlParser application to check the 
unitDictionary.xml file.

*Questions for discussion:*
1. Should we decouple the unitDictionary from EML so that additions to 
the unitDictionary would not require an EML release?
2. If you agree that unitDictionary should be decoupled what mechanism 
should be developed to validate units?

*Voting Question:*
1. After a two week period (time to allow for a review of 
unitDictionary) distribute a maintenance release of eml to reflect the 
addition of  numberPerLiter and numberPerMillilter?

If you vote NO, please state your rational.

2. I agree with the Proposed Procedure/Policy for making additions to 
the unitDictionary.
If you vote NO, please state your rational.






-- 
David E. Blankman
Database Integration Developer
Long Term Ecological Research Network Office
University of New Mexico
801 University, SE #104
Albuquerque, NM 87106
(505) 272-7346 / (505) 272-7080 FAX

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