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

[Ed Laurent]

What about the Mars <http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/mro/>Reconnaissance
Orbiterand other artificial satellites that orbit things besides
Earth? I was
thinking of Satellite as a very simple and generic type that could include
an "Orbiting body" property, reciprocated with "Satellite(s)". Maybe it
would have a couple other properties too? Many of the "Earth orbiting
satellite<http://www.freebase.com/tools/schema/user/spatialed/default_domain/earth_orbiting_satellite>"
properties should probably be split into "Geostationary", "Sun-synchronous"
and other orbiting types <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_orbits> so
that their orbits can be properly described.  Some of these types might be
appropriate for any satellite. An "Artificial satellite" type might have a
few more properties but would certainly be co-typed with "Spacecraft".
Specialty artificial satellite types could then be co-typed depending on
whether the satellite was used for observation or other purposes.

Co-typing, naming, and descriptions would be key so that users don't get
lost in these minutia when they're just trying to add some basic data
to Io<http://www.freebase.com/view/guid/9202a8c04000641f800000000040e186>vs.
Hubble <http://www.freebase.com/view/en/hubble_space_telescope> vs. Landsat
7 <http://www.freebase.com/view/en/landsat_7> vs. ....

Too complex?

-Ed

On Fri, May 2, 2008 at 10:35 PM, Danny Hillis <danny at appliedminds.com>
wrote:

> 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
>
> _______________________________________________
> Data-modeling mailing list
> Data-modeling at freebase.com
> http://lists.freebase.com/mailman/listinfo/data-modeling
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://lists.freebase.com/pipermail/data-modeling/attachments/20080502/6ff90cc1/attachment.htm