VOUnit for solar density or metallicity?

[Markus Demleitner]

Hi Marco,

On Wed, Jun 01, 2022 at 09:07:37AM +0200, Molinaro, Marco wrote:
> Goal would be: clients aware of these might use them,
> unaware clients/researchers will just skip by.

Would your expectation be that, say, astropy or unity would accept
them?

If so, I'd say nothing should keep us from adding them to the full
list.  If not... well, which clients would you expect to be "aware"?

> - extra parsing step for those who want to interpret
> them (remove quote, go on parsing)
> - extra controlled lists maintenance
> - (a sentence in VOUnits - §2.8? -)

I'd add "seduction to madnes^Wusing creative units".  I give you
there's little we can do about legacy data, but for those we cannot
always have ideal interoperability anyway.  For modern data, on the
other hand, exerting a certain amount of pressure to align practices
of questionable taste with mainstream (or, even better, sane) customs
will make things a lot simpler for posteriority.  For instance, it
would seem to me that with, say, decimal coordinates we are actually
making inroads.

So... I'll need quite a bit more convincing before I could see myself
liking the idea of such a shadow unit list; I also note that there
already is http://qudt.org/2.1/vocab/unit for the furlong/fortnight
enthusiasts [oh: fortnight isn't even in QUDT].

       -- Markus