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Stop squandering data

14 May 2022

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Make units of measurement machine-readable

The CODATA Task Group on Digital Representation of Units of Measurement (DRUM) and colleagues from the CIPM’s Digital SI Task Group have published a comment article in Nature. ‘Stop squandering data: make units of measurement machine-readable’ describes some of the pervasive challenges caused by “sloppy or missing units”. The current activity around FAIR cannot succeed unless the fundamental issue of consistent, machine-readable description of units in data is also addressed.

The article provides an overview of current activities globally, the role of DRUM and the Digital SI Expert Group. It includes a Call for Action ‘to create interoperable data with machine-readable quantities and units of measurement’ and invites colleagues to contact the Task Group to get involved.

Hanisch et al., ‘Stop squandering data: make units of measurement machine-readable’, Nature 605, 222-224 (2022); https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-022-01233-w (online 10 May 2022)

See corresponding IUPAC project 2022-009-1-100

_{Photo by Mika Baumeister on Unsplash}

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