Units of Measure

POSC, an energy industry consortium, has developed an XML specification for
how to handle units of measure (ft, m, acres, etc) in XML documents, and it
appears that they are moving toward issuing some version of it in
cooperation with OpenGIS (GIS = Geographical Information Systems).  It
appears to me there is, thus, a fairly significant industry backing for this
specification, but of course units of measure affect just about everybody.
The specification has gone through a fair amount of "work process" -- in
fact I believe that some people from the schema working group may have been
involved at one point or another -- and it seems to have become reasonably
mature and "use-tested".

We at ChevronTexaco would be happy to see consensus on how to deal with
common issues like units of measure, and we think that the W3C is at least a
plausible forum to reach that consensus.  We are also, within reason,
willing to act as a "proxy" for POSC and OpenGIS, neither of which is a W3C
member.  For example, if it seemed like a good thing to do we would probably
assist in submitting this spec as a "note" to the W3C.

I talked to Michael Sperberg-McQueen, leader of the architecture domain, and
he suggested that I raise the issue on this mailing list.

I attach some documentation for this specification.
 <<uomFinalRecs2.htm>>