Celestia Forums

I'm working on a search engine that returns coordinates and information about places on Planet Earth and other planets.

It supports Celestia but also NASA World Wind, and Google Earth and Stellarium (only for Planet Earth).

I need some feedback:
www.geody.com - the world's search engine

...especially if you have some ideas about things that could be done using Celestia scripting language.

yes

THXS !!!

[quote="ElfQrin"]I'm working on a search engine that returns coordinates and information about places on Planet Earth and other planets.
[/quote]

Hmm. Well it found Onekaka where I was born - that was tough. On mars
could find eagle not victoria. Whats the name source for mars?

For Planet Earth, I've merged several sources, while the source for Mars is the U.S. Geological Survey, and it might be a bit outdated (year 2004).

Check the new Geody Space.

You can search for all stars in the Hipparcos catalogue.

It supports Celestia, NASA World Wind SDSS, and Stellarium.

ElfQrin wrote:Check the new Geody Space.

You can search for all stars in the Hipparcos catalogue.

This you can also do in Celestia...

What's the diffeence? Did you eliminate the many typos in the original catalog? In Celestia we did a lot in this direction, for example.

Bye Fridger

t00fri wrote:

ElfQrin wrote:Check the new Geody Space.

You can search for all stars in the Hipparcos catalogue.

This you can also do in Celestia...

What's the diffeence? Did you eliminate the many typos in the original catalog? In Celestia we did a lot in this direction, for example.

Bye Fridger

The difference is that Geody is an online search engine, not an offline stand alone application.

They do different thing, although share the same catalogue.

It's like saying that apple pie and pasta are the same thing because both contain flour.

Also "Space" is just an extra feature, it can also locate places on Planet Earth and other planets of the Solar System.

ElfQrin wrote:...
The difference is that Geody is an online search engine, not an offline stand alone application.

They do different thing, although share the same catalogue.

It's like saying that apple pie and pasta are the same thing because both contain flour.

Also "Space" is just an extra feature, it can also locate places on Planet Earth and other planets of the Solar System.

Usually, I am not the kind of guy who mixes up apple pie and pasta .

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Between the lines I meant to ask: what is the relevance of your search engine for Celestia?

If we want to use official online data bases, we tend to use e.g. SIMBAD etc There are plenty of scientific ONLINE data in the net. Usually, we know were to look.
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Offline, we use the same professional catalogs, but work hard to eliminate errors that are documented via PERL scipts in human readable fashion.

An online database of HIP stars will output all the many typos and errors that the original catalog had. Did you incorporate at least the various official HIP updates?

We also have extended data incorporated on locations for all planets/moons. We have location files with locations of 40000+ cities/towns/villages. They are all from official sources.

We have way better textures for Celestia etc.

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So what do you suggest the Celestia community should do with your data base?
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Bye Fridger

i don't think geody stands in any competition to celestia.

the big difference is that celestia is a standalone application to visualize all the data it contains while geody is a purely informational online browsable search engine.

phoenix wrote:i don't think geody stands in any competition to celestia.

the big difference is that celestia is a standalone application to visualize all the data it contains while geody is a purely informational online browsable search engine.

I have no problems understanding that difference. Indeed I did from the beginning. I was also not talking about a competition.

The question is simply what is the relevance of Geody for Celestians, given that this is a Celestia forum! And given that there are plenty of official scientific data bases in the net that we normally consult if we want online information about the Universe. Unlike Geody these well-known databases have proven scientific reliability! Do you really think as a scientist I would look some star properties up in GEODY rather than in SIMBAD, the official online database of professional astronomers?

http://simbad.u-strasbg.fr/sim-fid.pl

Or in ALADIN

http://aladin.u-strasbg.fr/aladin.gml

Or in VizieR

http://vizier.u-strasbg.fr/viz-bin/VizieR

It is actually incorrect that Celestia is only for visualizing scientific data. We do have quite a bit of official written information to look up for each celestial object.

Moreover, Celestia connects directly to the professional online databases via the internet, by clicking the info button on the popup belonging to a selected object.

Many people don't seem to know about this great feature!

Bye Fridger

t00fri wrote:It is actually incorrect that Celestia is only for visualizing scientific data. We do have quite a bit of official written information to look up for each celestial object.

ok i see your point.

Moreover, Celestia connects directly to the professional online databases via the internet, by clicking the info button on the popup belonging to a selected object.

Many people don't seem to know about this great feature!

Bye Fridger

that's chris fault, he keeps enhancing the visuals so realistic everyone is just ohhhhhhhhh and ahhhhhhhhhhh...

There's no need to be so grumpy!

All I wanted was some feedback, as stated in the topic, something like how to make Geody work better with Celestia, and if there were some extra features that a Celestia user might need.

For example, I've received some excellent ideas from the NASA World Wind forum, and Geody Space was in fact suggested to support World Wind SDSS. The HP catalogue is obviously a very small subset of SDSS, but Geody is a very young search engine, and can still grow up and evolve. Currently I'm mainly focusing on Planet Earth, where I've merged several databases providing about six millions locations (a bit more than 40000 ).

And as for stars, SIMBAD, ALADIN, and VizieR are surely more complete, and excellent for scientists, but their home page and search form would scare away most average users.

Anyway all databases used by Geody are official and come from US or EU agencies or military. However, as I've said Geody is still under development and there's room for many improvements.

ElfQrin,

in order to be able to argue more concretely, it is perhaps best, if YOU tell us concisely, what purpose and which kind of users you envisage for Geody?

For me Geody presents itself as follows:

--an ill-defined search engine which fails to document on it's WEB page what data bases it contains in /complete/ form. No detailed bibliography of the used scientific resources is available in the GUI!

Rather you write in your Acknowledgement section that
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Data and imagery were furtherly manipulated and re-elaborated.
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Who is going to rely on such ill-defined statements about Geody, when looking for correct information!?

Your manipulations of official data are not documented in easily accessible, human readable form. It is also not stated whether the author of Geody is professionally qualified to perform such data manipulations of data from a wide range of fields.

-- I cannot see a well-defined target group of people who would seriously use such a badly documented resource. Geody is certainly NOT for scientists.

Why should users trust Geody's output?

As you wrote above, perhaps because they were put off by the GUI of established, professional online data bases like SIMBAD, ALADIN, VizieR (5588 documented catalogs!), the JPL HORIZONS online solar system data and ephemeris computation service , GOOGLE Maps, GOOGLE Earth, etc...?

Come on! Many Celestians have been using these GUI's without major problems...

Also non-scientists are keen to get CORRECT and COMPLETE answers, when questioning a data base.

Bye Fridger

If the usability of the user interface is an issue with the professional databases, it seems to me to be more appropriate to work on that part of the problem rather than to try to reproduce the databases.

If the site actually queried the professional databases rather than using its own databases of unknown (to the user) quality, that would seem to me to address at least some of the problems that Fridger points out.