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

[Danny Hillis]

I like what you suggest about moving Discoverer,etc.

One issue that we should consider is that almost any celestial object  
is orbiting around something, even is it is the black hole at the  
center of the galaxy. Maybe the idea of "orbit" is more useful for  
this than making the type Satellite too generic. We could keep  
Satellite as meaning as earth-orbiting artificial satellite and give  
all celestial bodies an orbit and (as you suggest) a set of orbiting  
bodies.
-Danny


On May 2, 2008, at 6:10 PM, Gordon Mackenzie 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 >>>
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Data-modeling mailing list
> Data-modeling at freebase.com
> http://lists.freebase.com/mailman/listinfo/data-modeling