On 19 Aug 2009, at 19:20, Karsten Hilbert wrote:
Alban,
I think having an installable schema for units of measure with
definitions and functions would be a great addition to PostgreSQL.
Karsten,
Thanks for the praise and the links.
I for one know we would use it in GNUmed (wiki.gnumed.de).
A few points:
Would these guys be of use as a source for reference data ?
http://unitsofmeasure.org/
That looks certainly interesting, especially the fact that they
provide a source of units and conversions in an XML format. Although
their conversion formulas don't look all that easy to parse.
I've run into a few of the problems they mention already; for example
the slight differences between imperial and US units of measurement
with the same names and abbreviations...
You may want to think about whether there's use in combining
units with tagged types:
http://svana.org/kleptog/pgsql/taggedtypes.html
Yes, I've been thinking the same thing. I had it bookmarked already
for the very purpose of checking it out and see how I could use tagged
types with units.
There's also a Debian package which comes with a text format
units database:
http://packages.debian.org/source/sid/units
The original source for that:
This package was put together by me, James Troup <james@xxxxxxxxxx>,
from the GNU sources, which I obtained from
sunsite.doc.ic.ac.uk:/pub/gnu/units-1.54.tar.gz.
I don't consider that tool very reliable[1]. A number of their
concepts are probably usable though. I have it's source in my source
tree (FreeBSD), so ample opportunity to peek.
[1] It doesn't correctly convert °C to °F or vv, that was one of the
first things I tried.
The current version of the package was obtained from
ftp://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/units
by John Hasler, the current Debian maintainer.
I think this database is fairly usable in its current state. Any more
development on it
Yes please ! :-)
He he, all right then! There certainly are some things left to
improve. One thing I noticed from the links you sent is that I ignored
a few units used in medicine assuming they were deprecated ages ago -
apparently not...
Then again, encouraging their usage may not be the best thing to do,
but who am I to decide what units people use eh?
warrants its own project page somewhere and taking
it off-list, I'll no longer pester you with updates on this ;)
Ah, no problem. Please keep posting release announcements. Maybe
on -announce if so.
Yes, announce would be the right place. I dislike it when people start
using this list for announcements of new versions of their software,
so let's not start doing that myself :)
Alban Hertroys
--
If you can't see the forest for the trees,
cut the trees and you'll see there is no forest.
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