Naming and Terminology #

Terms #

• Unit: A unit of measurement.
• Value: A quantity measured with a unit.
• Field: A measurement of a value. A field and a column in spreadsheet can be considered equivalent.

Field naming #

Field names use what’s commonly called snake_case. snake_case names should be lowercase and have words separated by underscores (the _ symbol).

Fields should ideally never abbreviations and should strive to be descriptive.

Examples:

Good:

• distance - in cases where the unit is defined in a standard such as this
• distance_meters

Bad:

• Distance_Meters
• distance meters
• Distance Meters
• DistanceMeters
• distanceMeters
• distM
• dist_m
• distance_m
• dist
• dist_meters
• DISTANCE
• DISTANCE_METERS