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Welcome to the Fact Guru Astronomy knowledge base.

• The left pane shows Astronomy subjects arranged in a concept hierarchy - each subject is a kind of the subject above it.
• By default the hierarchy is in HTML format, however by clicking on the "Applet browser" link you can use the applet version with more features.
• You can view the subjects in alphabetical order by clicking on the alphabetical tab in the left pane :
• If you click on a subject in the hierarchy, you will see facts about that subject appear in this pane.
• To search for a subject, use the Find box or press Ctrl F.
• You can compare what the differences are between a subject and its siblings or between all the children of a subject by clicking on the Compare tab in this pane.
• Move the mouse over the icon to view the source or date.
• The icon indicates the subject has an image.
• To link from an external web site to a subject in the astronomy knowledge base use http://www.site.uottawa.ca/~tcl/factguru1/astronomy/ then append .html to the subject name and remove the spaces. Here are three examples :

Subject name	URL
star	http://www.site.uottawa.ca/~tcl/factguru1/astronomy/star.html
Balmer jump	http://www.site.uottawa.ca/~tcl/factguru1/astronomy/Balmerjump.html
Oschin 48-inch Telescope	http://www.site.uottawa.ca/~tcl/factguru1/astronomy/Oschin48-inchTelescope.html

To view this knowledge base offline, you can download this 11 MByte ZIP file. This knowledge base contains 3122 subjects and 17107 facts (as of May 1, 2003).

The concept hierarchy and the part of hierarchy were authored by John Talbot as a proposal for an astronomy Ontology for the semantic web. The International Virtual Observatory Knowledge Engineering mailing list describes a similar effort. This astronomy knowledge base makes use of definitions from the Level 5 Knowledge Base.

© FactGuru, 2003