The great equipment database migration of 2021/22

Written By Salvatore Iovene

AstroBin is used by tens of thousands of people, collectively owning hundreds of thousands of equipment items, ranging from cameras, to telescopes, to mounts, to filters, to accessories, to software.

Most of AstroBin visitors use the site to search for equipment items. You are interested in finding images acquired with a certain telescope or a certain camera that you own or are evaluating for purchasing.

 

The problem

During the past 10 years, AstroBin has allowed a great degree of freedom in the way you add items to your profile and images, which has resulted in a lot of duplicates under slightly different names, and a lot of equipment items that are impossible to identify as a specific products.

While AstroBin's search engine tries to be as smart as possible when matching your search query to the a good result set, you will have noticed that it's not perfect. Whenever you search for something, but get unexpected results, or you are missing results because you're not using the right query parameters for an equipment-based search, you are seeing the adverse result of fragmentation.

Due to duplication and consequent fragmentation, there are over 140,000 equipment items in AstroBin's database, at the time of writing. This is far larger than the actual number of unique products for astrophotography that one might buy.

 
 

The number of equipment items in the legacy database: many times larger that the number of products for astronomy that actually exist.

 
 
 

An example of the many spelling mistakes that caused fragmentation.

 
 

The solution

The solution to this problem is a polished and curated database of equipment items that provides tools to minimize fragmentation.

AstroBin has been working on this full steam since July 2021, and we all are about the reap the fruits of this frankly intense effort.

We have built the following:

  1. Data models and user input tools for the following item classes:

    1. Sensor

    2. Camera

    3. Telescope

    4. Mount

    5. Filter

    6. Accessory

    7. Software

  2. A collaborative solution to edit items wikipedia-style, with a peer-review process, comments, and notifications.

  3. An initial database of Sensors, Cameras, Telescopes, Filters, and Mounts, that aims to cover the majority of the users.

  4. Individual pages for each equipment item, with:

    1. All available product pictures and technical specifications

    2. Images acquired with this item

    3. A dedicated forum to create a community around every equipment items

    4. Links to AstroBin sponsors who sell this item

 
 
 

We are in the process of building the following:

  1. New search filters on the Advanced search page that allows you to select a specific equipment item to filter images.

  2. New search filters to allow you to find images by specific technical properties of the equipment items used to acquire them (e.g. pixel size of the CCD, focal length of the telescope, etc).

 

AstroBin needs your contribution and patience

If you're reading this as an AstroBin user, most likely you have many equipment items that you have added to your profile and images on AstroBin, and they need to be migrated to the products in the new equipment database.

The actual migration process is starting in April 2022, and you will asked to be involved at some point.

Please keep an eye out for future notices on AstroBin regarding confirming renaming proposals and migrating your own equipment items to the new database.

Don't worry, we worked hard to make this easy for you!

When the time comes, please remember: this is a database of products. This means:

  • Be mindful of creating DIY items: they should only be created if they really are self-made and non-commercially available products. The DIY items that you create will be available to you only.

  • No mentions of properties of your specific instance of a certain product (e.g. “sold”)

  • Be very mindful of AstroBin's suggestions of similar items: do not create duplicates!

 

How this process will pan out

AstroBin will very slowly roll out invitations to perform your migrations. All items will be reviewed by a moderator and you will be notified in case of approval/rejection.

If an item is rejected, you will be asked to migrate it again. The rejection will come with a reason and an optional comment, so please use them to understand what went wrong and what is the correct way to migrate an item.

Common mistakes to avoid are:

  • Inconsistent naming conventions

  • Typos

  • Incorrect brand or item name

  • Incomplete name

  • Creating something that is not an actual product that you might buy (or might have been able to buy in the past)

  • Creating duplicates of items that already exist

 

Conclusion

We will never be completely ridden of the legacy equipment database, for many reasons (inactive members will not migrate, and even when AstroBin will step in, and attempt to migrate their items for them, many of these items will not be unambiguously reconducible to specific products).

However, this is fine.

For one, the good old text-based free search will still find images acquired with those items. Additionally, so long as the most common equipment items are migrated, they will be automatically migrated also for inactive members (once AstroBin steps in after an appropriate amount of time and number of emails).

Personally, I'm looking forward to this migration very much, and I have literally buried myself into a lot of work since July 2021 to facilitate this. I want to thank David Stevenson, Gernot Schreider and Matthew MacLean for their outstanding contributions to the database!

Salvatore Iovene
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October 2021 update