VOUnits: _another_ version, based on implementation feedback

[Arnold Rots]

On Tue, Dec 24, 2013 at 2:33 PM, Norman Gray <norman at astro.gla.ac.uk> wrote:

>
> Francois, hello.
> ...
> > * About the units listed in Table 2: I tend to agree with Arnold that
> the abbreviations
> >  "Ba" and "ta" proposed for the Besselian and tropical years look
> strange -- if such
> >  units are required, "Byr"  and "tyr" would likely reach a better
> consensus;
>
> I think that Arnold's concern was that he was torn between being reluctant
> to include these units in the 'known units' list, but at the same time
> being reluctant to discard them completely.  They're currently in the
> document as known-but-deprecated in FITS, and unknown in VOUnits.
>

No, Arnold's concern was (and is) that these are troublesome units since
they are not well understood
by most people and certainly not SI. So they definitely should be
deprecated.
However, they have been used and there is a fair body of archival data that
contain temporal information
expressed in these units. For that reason I feel we have no choice but to
accept them.
Apologies if my use of the qualification "reluctant" (I think that's what I
said) caused confusion as to
what I meant to convey (which is what I expressed here).
"a" is the preferred symbol for year.

  - Arnold


> ...
> Since they're in the FITS spec as 'Ba' and 'ta', I'd be reluctant to
> _change_ their name if they were included in the VOUnits list.
> Best wishes,
>
> Norman
>
>
> --
> Norman Gray  :  http://nxg.me.uk
> SUPA School of Physics and Astronomy, University of Glasgow, UK
>
>
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