This post expands on some text from the README of iam-units, in order to illustrate some improved ways to structure data and metadata. These are especially helpful in systems research, where data from multiple disciplines/domains/contexts are often combined.

iam-units is a thin wrapper around the very useful pint, that I wrote with some colleagues to handle unit conversions for data from integrated assessment models (IAMs) of energy and climate, including global warming potential (GWP) conversions between greenhouse gas (GHG) species:

In [1]: from iam_units import registry, convert_gwp
[13:04:34] WARNING  Redefining 'kt' (<class                      registry.py:537
                    'pint …