unit
the property of a channel definition sets the level of specificity
for a temporal field. Currently supported values are 'year', 'yearmonth',
'yearmonthday', 'yearmonthdate', 'yearday', 'yeardate', 'yearmonthdayhours'
and 'yearmonthdayhoursminutes' for non-periodic time units & 'month',
'day', 'date', 'hours', 'minutes', 'seconds', 'milliseconds', 'hoursminutes',
'hoursminutesseconds', 'minutesseconds' and 'secondsmilliseconds' for
periodic time units.