Narrowing down the elements and attributes in IS 29500 that might need measurement units

[Chris Rae]

Reporting back to our assigned task force, and including WG4 just in case it's interesting.

As you'll recall, we agreed in Prague that Murata-san, Jirka and I would try to establish from the prose and schema how many elements and attributes may need measurement units added to them in order to DRs 09-0295 and 11-0001. I was attacking this from a prose point of view, and I've now finished the first section of this work. I'd like to run through my methodology and findings. Right now, I have only accounted for attributes - it will be a separate and somewhat more complex piece of work to account for elements.

What I did:

* Find a big list of measurement units and their abbreviations (I used Wikipedia)
* Search through the normative prose of IS 29500 marking every instance of these strings
* Cycle through these manually looking for ones that actually referred to measurement units. This removed a lot - many units (e.g. "points") also appear regularly in the text, and some (e.g. "cm") are attribute or element names 
* Remove any of these which occurred outside attribute definitions (elements and other areas will be covered later)
* Remove any of these which already had optional measurement units permitted, either directly or through use of the appropriate simple types

What I have discovered:

* There appear to be 83 attributes in Part 1 of the standard which use measurement units but do not allow the optional specifiers which were created at the BRM

The attached document shows the various attributes which I think would need to be modified.

For the measurement units that appear outside attribute definitions, it's going to be a lot harder to find a way of quantifying the number of changes that need to be made. I'll do some thinking about this and report back.

Chris
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