What is UCUM?

The Unified Code for Units of Measure (UCUM) is a code system intended to include all units of measures being contemporarily used in international science, engineering, and business. The purpose is to facilitate unambiguous electronic communication of quantities together with their units. The focus is on electronic communication, as opposed to communication between humans. A typical application of The Unified Code for Units of Measure are electronic data interchange (EDI) protocols, but there is nothing that prevents it from being used in other types of machine communication.

UCUM supports EDI protocols for the quantities and units in the domains of knowledge specified in ISO 80000 standards parts 2-14 above.

Why is UCUM needed?

The real value of the restriction on the character set and typographical details, however, is not to cope with legacy systems and less powerful technology, but to facilitate unambiguous communication and interpretation of the meaning of units from one computer system to another. In this respect, ISO 2955 and ANSI X3.50 are not obsolete because there is no other standard that would fill in for inter-systems communication of units. However, ISO 2599 and ANSI X3.50 currently have severe defects:

1. ISO 2955 and ANSI X3.50 contain numerous name conflicts, both direct conflicts (e.g., “a” being used for both year and are) and conflicts that are generated through combination of unit symbols with prefixes (e.g., “cd” means candela and centi-day and “PEV” means peta-volt and pico-electronvolt.)
2. Neither ISO 2955 nor ANSI X3.50 cover all units that are currently used in practice. There are many more units in use than what is allowed by the Système International d’Unités (SI) and accompanying standards. For example, the older CGM-units dyne and erg are still used in the science of physiology. Although ANSI X3.50 extends ISO 2955 with some U.S. customary units, it is still not complete in this respect. For example it doesn’t define the degree Fahrenheit.
3. ANSI X3.50 is semantically ambiguous with respect to customary units, even if we do not consider the history and international aspects of customary units. Three systems of mass units are used in the U.S., avoirdupois used generally, apothecaries’ used by pharmacists, and troy used in trade with Gold and other precious metals. ANSI X3.50 has no way to select any one of those specifically, which is bad in medicine, where both apothecaries’ and avoirdupois weights are being used frequently.

ISO 2955 and all standards that do only look for the resolutions and recommendations of the CGPM and the Comité International des Poids et Mesures (CIPM) as published by the Bureau International des Poids et Mesures (BIPM) and various ISO standards (ISO 1000 and ISO 31) fail to recognize that the needs in practice are often different from the ideal propositions of the CGPM. Although not allowed by the CGPM and related ISO standards, many other units are used in international sciences, healthcare, engineering, and business, both meaningfully and some units of questionable meaning. A coding system that is to be useful in practice must cover the requirements and habits of the practice—even some of the bad habits.

None of the current standards attempt to specify a semantics of units that can be deployed in information systems with moderate requirements. Metrological standards such as those published by the BIPM are dedicated to maximal scientific correctness of reproducible definitions of units. These definitions make sense only to human specialists and can hardly be deployed to their full extent by any information system that is not dedicated to metrology. On the other hand, ISO 2955 and ANSI X3.50 provide no semantics at all for the codes they define.

The Unified Code for Units of Measure intends to provide a single coding system for units that is complete, free of all ambiguities, and that assigns to each defined unit a concise semantics. In communication it is not only important that all communicating parties have the same repertoir of signs, but also that all attach the same meaning to the signals they exchange. The common meaning must be computationally verifiable. The Unified Code for Units of Measure assumes a semantics for units based on dimensional analysis.¹

In short, each unit is defined relative to a system of base units by a numeric factor and a vector of exponents by which the base units contribute to the unit to be defined. Although we can reflect all the meaning of units covered by dimensional analysis with this vector notation, the following tables do not show these vectors. One reason is that the vectors depend on the base system chosen and even on the ordering of the base units. The other reason is that these vectors are hard to understand to human readers while they can be easily derived computationally. Therefore we define new unit symbols using algebraic terms of other units. Those algebraic terms are also valid codes of The Unified Code for Units of Measure.

Why UCUM?

The Unified Code for Units of Measures is very stable in content and has already been adopted by some standard organizations such as DICOM, HL7 and has been referenced as best practice by the Open Geospatial Consortium in their Web Map Service (WMS) and Geography Markup Language (GML) implementation specifications. We are still looking for the best way to establish this specification as a widely used industry standard. The official status and the affiliation may change during that process. However, we try to keep as much as possible of the specification freely available and redistributable to assure the maximum use and benefit. We would also like to keep this specification maintainable and flexible to update. Although the initial version contains more than 250 terminal unit symbols (more than three times as many symbols as in ANSI X3.50), there are areas that are not covered completely yet.

The specification is maintained electronically so that the printed version is guaranteed to contain consistent and tested data that is free from severe name conflicts or random errors.