unitDictionay additions made should we do a supplemental release?

[Dan Higgins]

Scott,
    I was looking over your message and noted your use of "m²" . It is 
of interest that the superscript '²' is not a standard ASCII character 
(i.e. the upper bit of its 8-bit representation is set, while most 
standard ASCII uses only the lower 7 bits). This may not be a problem in 
most cases, but we ran into a similar issue with the special character 
for 'degrees' in Morpho with some unicode/Java not recognizing such high 
order bit characters. (I think the main problem was with the Xalan XSLT 
processor not working when such special characters were in the document 
that was being transformed.)

    It took us a good bit of effort to diagnose the problem, and we are 
recommending that any special 8 bit characters should be avoided. So 
just a word of warning and a suggestion that maybe we should avoid such 
characters in EML docs.

Dan Higgins
NCEAS



Scott Chapal wrote:

>[For Solar Radiation], does this look reasonable?
>
>  <!--powerFlux-->
>  <unitType id="powerFlux" name="powerFlux"> <!--wattsPerMeterSquared-->
>	<dimension name="power"/>
>        <dimension name="length" power="2"/>
>  </unitType>
>
>  <!--energyFlux-->
>  <unitType id="energyFlux" name="energyFlux"> <!--kiloJoulesPerMeterSquared-->
>        <dimension name="energy"/>
>        <dimension name="length" power="2"/>
>  </unitType>
>
>  <init id="wattsPerMeterSquared" name="wattsPerMeterSquared"
>        abbreviation="W/m²"
>	multiplierToSI="1"/>
>    <description>Watts per Meter Squared</description>
>  </unit>
>
>  <unit id="kiloJoulesPerMeterSquared" name="kiloJoulesPerMeterSquared"
>        abbreviation="kJ/m²"
>        multiplierToSI="1"/>
>    <description>Kilo Joules per Meter Squared</description>
>  </unit>
>
>BTW, this excercise makes me wonder if we aren't re-inventing the
>wheel, OR inventing a wheel that we shouldn't have to.   Has anybody
>reviewed:
>
>http://www.unc.edu/~rowlett/units/index.html
>
>He certainly seems to have some expertise in the area.
>
>And, what about NIST itself, or some other government standards body?
>Why are WE having to do this and keep it correct and up to date?  I
>definitely believe the unit dictionary should be de-coupled from EML
>in the next release.
>
>-Scott
>
>Scott Chapal <scott.chapal at jonesctr.org> writes:
>
>  
>
>>Has the thinking on the unit-dictionary progressed?
>>
>>What is discussed below seems a bit heavyweight to me.  Why can't a
>>versioned unit dictionary exist as a simple stand alone schema
>>document, referencable via a namespace declaration?  Considerations for
>>backward compatibility would obviously apply.
>>
>>Working with our climate data, I found the need for:
>>
>>kiloPascal
>>wattsPerMeterSquared
>>kiloJoulePerMeterSquared
>>Fuel Moisture % - percentWaterContentByWeight ??
>>
>>Relative Humidity is presumably unitless?
>>
>>-Scott
>>    
>>
>
>  
>


-- 
*******************************************************************
Dan Higgins                                  higgins at nceas.ucsb.edu
http://www.nceas.ucsb.edu/    Ph: 805-892-2531
National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis (NCEAS) 
735 State Street - Room 205
Santa Barbara, CA 93195
*******************************************************************