Unified Code for Units of Measure

The code set includes all units defined in ISO 1000, ISO 2955-1983, ANSI X3.50-1986, HL7 and ENV 12435, and explicitly and verifiably addresses the naming conflicts and ambiguities in those standards to resolve them. It provides for representations of units in 7 bit ASCII for machine-to-machine communication, with unambiguous mapping between case-sensitive and case-insensitive representations.

A reference open-source implementation is available as a Java applet. There is also an OSGi-based implementation at Eclipse Foundation.

Base units

Units are represented in UCUM with reference to a set of seven base units. The UCUM base units are the metre for measurement of length, the second for time, the gram for mass, the coulomb for charge, the kelvin for temperature, the candela for luminous intensity, and the radian for plane angle. The UCUM base units form a set of mutually independent dimensions as required by dimensional analysis.

Some of the UCUM base units are different from the SI base units. UCUM is compatible with, but not isomorphic with, SI. There are four differences between the two sets of base units:

1. The gram is the base unit of mass instead of the kilogram, since in UCUM base units do not have prefixes.
2. Electric charge is the base quantity for electromagnetic phenomena instead of electric current, since the elementary charge of electrons is more fundamental physically.
3. The mole is dimensionless in UCUM, since it can be defined in terms of the Avogadro number,
4. The radian is a distinct base unit for plane angle, to distinguish angular velocity from rotational frequency and to distinguish the radian from the steradian for solid angles.