Best practices for `unit` values?
Closed this issue · 2 comments
The current raster spec does not give much guidance about the unit
field, and inconsistency in the field may make datasets less interoperable.
As a concrete example, should a unit be meter
or metre
or meters
or m
or cm
or km
?
It would be good to describe a best practice for this field. For example:
- Use the International System of Units (SI) Here is a good overview
- Use SI base units or SI derived units
- Use the raster extension
scale
field rather than SI prefixes - Use unit symbols rather than unit names
The datacube extension (and others, too, I think) use:
The unit of measurement for the data, preferably compliant to UDUNITS-2 units (singular).
Is this good enough? It's difficult to standardize here as people have so diverging needs.
This field will be migrated to STAC core metadata in 1.1 (raster 2.0) so is not that relevant for the raster extension, but for core.
Implemented in radiantearth/stac-spec#1254 through commit radiantearth/stac-spec@f35f5d8