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J. Gass, E. Shaya, B. Thomas, J. Blackwell (Astronomical Data Center/GSFC-NASA, RITSS), C. Cheung (Astronomical Data Center/GSFC-NASA)
A fundamental characteristic of any scientific data is its physical units. Unit comparisons and conversions are required in order to understand the meaning of the data and whether or not certain operations on the data are meaningful. For example, only data with equivalent units should be merged.
Intelligent query of distributed systems, such as is envisioned for the NVO, will need to integrate or merge data with mixed conventions of units. It would be desirable to provide a standard process to enable machine understanding of units. We present a solution to this problem using XML entities. Our solution features a flexibility to encompass current unit systems, ease of human use, and interoperability (XML/MathML based) between heterogeneous operating systems.
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The author(s) of this abstract have provided an email address for comments about the abstract: shaya@xfiles.gsfc.nasa.gov