Astro 3.0's Natural Language Search

edited September 2010 in AstroSynthesis General
One of the goals for AS3 was to improve on its searching capabilities. Astro3 will tackle this by providing a vastly improved search system featuring a 'natural language search' interface.

What this means is that in the search boxes (there will be 2 - one on the main window, and one in an advanced search window), you can specify a query that can search bodies based on any of their attributes.

You could, for example, simply type 'hospitable', to get a list of all hospitable planets.

Or, 'hospitable, gravity > 0.8', for hospitiable planets with a gravity greater than 0.8g.

You can also query a body's parent. So you can say something like 'hospitable, gravity > 0.8, parent is gasgiant', to return all hospitable moons of gas giants with a gravity > 0.8g.

Similarly, you can also query a body's parent star, and the root body in a system. For example, 'hospitable, gravity > 0.8, parent is gasgiant, parent star spectral like k9v'.

Or bodies within a certain distance of selected systems, 'hospitable, within 10', or connected via a route to selected systems, 'hospitable, on route'. Or systems within a subsector, 'hospitable, in subsector Vega'.

The searching also supports a BETWEEN operator, so 'gravity between 0.8 and 1.2'. And a NOT operator, 'parent is not gasgiant'.

And of course, you can still search for names, either by just entering text and pressing enter, or using something like 'name like Wolf'. There's both an exact match operator, =, and a partial match operator, like, to match part of the name.

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