[webservices] parsing units in FDSNStationXML

[Philip Crotwell]

Are there any guildlines for how the name of a unit in FDSNStationXML
should be formed? Other than "do it like SEED"?

I know the unit says it is the same as SEED blockette 34, but the SEED spec
says use SI but use all uppercase, which contradicts the SI convention that
case matters. So for example with prefixes m is milli and M is mega, and
for units g is gram while G is gauss and s is second while S is siemens. I
suppose most of seismology is covered by volt, meter, second and count, but
there are more and more types of data begin recorded at seismic stations
and so more varieties of units we need to support. And at some point it
would be nice to get away from a "formatted as FORTRAN-like equations with
all alphabetic characters in upper case" way of writing units and make us
of the existing standards for better portability and exchange within and
outside of seismology. It seems sad that the units are still just
unstructured strings that make it challenging for code to parse and
correctly interpret.  Following something like this might be useful:
http://physics.nist.gov/cuu/Units/



Just a thought,
Philip
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