Exoplanet comments

  1.  
    1. Hi -- I replied to Gordon's posting about your exoplanet schema on the data modelers list.  I'm copying it here, but you may want to join the list if you haven't done so already:

      ---- 

      As you know I'm not into over-abstraction, but I wonder if it wouldn't make sense to factor out some of these properties into a more abstract type.  Currently the astronomy domain has a type called "celestial object":

      http://www.freebase.com/view/schema/astronomy/celestial_object

      and Planet:

      http://www.freebase.com/view/schema/astronomy/planet

      Neither of these have the many useful properties you've added to exoplanet, yet both of them overlap several of the properties that you've added to exoplanet.

      Celestial object, at least, seems pretty abstract.  Planet, on the other hand, could be very specific -- the planets in our solar system, but it could also include moons, asteroids and exoplanets, much like the "Planet" infobox does on Wikipedia.

      I'm not an astronomer, so somebody with more domain expertise would probably provide better guidance, but I think that it would make sense to have the Exoplanet pull most of its properties from Celestial object and another type which would define all of the properties for non-star celestial objects.  Despite Wikipedia's precedent, I think calling this type a "planet" is probably a bad idea, given how charged that definition can be.

      Does this makes sense?

      1. Hi Robert,
        Thanks for your message. I'm also not an Astronomer nor a Data-Modeler so I appreciate any feedback from everyone. Someone from both camps or somebody in between would definitely help a lot. I also like to simplify things. So as of now, the Exoplanet type is fine for me. Having the thought in mind to someday create a 'Freebased' widget from the Exoplanet type, it's schema seems pretty simple at this point IMO and quite user-friendly and helpful for anyone wanting to get familiar with Exoplanets and learn more about it's properties. Because Exoplanetology is a very new field, modelling the data for exoplanet type would be quite a challenge, specially when trying to 'integrate' it into a very broad field such as Astronomy, (if possible at all). But thanks to Gordon's ( gmackenz) work on it that its almost coming into a stable schema. And i'm glad Freebase is here as a platform for learning more about exoplanets. Again, thank you for your input. Have a great day!


    Discussion is posted in:

    Think this discussion also relates to something else? Cross-post it by adding a new discussion area:

Search Discussions

Related Discussions