[Data-modeling] Astronomy: Celestial Objects and Natural Satellites

[Ed Laurent]

Great timing! A couple of us are about to do some refactoring of the
Spaceflight <http://www.freebase.com/view/spaceflight> domain that is
relevant to this discussion. One of the things we want to do is refine some
of the properties currently included in the
Satellite<http://www.freebase.com/tools/schema/spaceflight/satellite>type
and move other properties to other types so Satellite describes the
orbital characteristics of any satellite - natural or artificial. Hopefully
it will be useful as a co-type on various celestial object types. Maybe the
generic Satellite type would be better housed within your domain?

I'm planning to work on Satellite this weekend. I'll send a note out to this
list with a link once I have something worth considering for your purposes.
I'll make sure to look at your Celestial Object and Astronomical Object
types while I'm modeling it.

-Ed


On Fri, May 2, 2008 at 9:10 PM, Gordon Mackenzie <gordon at metaweb.com> wrote:

> Metapsyche and I did some work a while back to add more useful
> properties for his exoplanet type and I am considering moving most of
> those properties to Celestial Object and adding planet as a co-type.
> Celestial Object is our workhorse of a generic Astronomical Object
> type that is included by Star, Planet, Natural Satellite, Asteroid,
> Comet types. I'm unsure what specifically to retain within exoplanet,
> pretty much most of the non-celestial object bound properties could be
> placed within the Planet type. Exoplanet could be just a boolean true/
> false for is this planet an exoplanet for that matter.
>
> So Celestial Object would have added specifically:
>
> Discoverer, Discovery Date, Discovery Method, Discovery status,
> Discovery Institution/organization
>
> And then remove/move the data for the related discovery properties in
> Planet/Asteroid/Comet  types to the equivalents in Celestial Body.
> Planet type might have both jupiter and earth-based radius and mass
> properties.
>
> One question I have is whether Natural Satellites should be
> individually added as a property to Planet and Asteroid types or to
> add as a single property to just Celestial Object. The latter is
> simpler, but the former allows cleaner demarcation of moons of
> planetary bodies and asteroidal moons.
>
> ~ Gordon
>
> <<< gordon at metaweb.com >>>
>
>
>
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