The platform behind the website

One core, many clients

• Website
• Mobile App
• Desktop App
• Developer Portal
• Public API
• AI Applications
• Planetarium Integrations
• Educational Systems
• Future Community

Architecture layers

Seven independent layers with an acyclic dependency contract. The Graph layer is the core; it never depends on a layer above it.

1. 0Presentation Layer

   Views and interfaces. The website is one client; mobile, desktop, and embeds are future clients. Pages are views — entities are reality.

   app, components
2. 1Explorer Layer

   Discovery, search, comparison, recommendations — the ways humans and machines traverse the graph.

   lib/discovery, lib/search, lib/compare
3. 2Knowledge Layer

   Editorial knowledge built on entities: content entries, the section/category taxonomy, learning paths, and timelines.

   content, lib/content, lib/learn, lib/timelines
4. 3Graph Layer

   The operating core: the canonical knowledge graph of entities and typed relations. Everything references entities; nothing references pages.

   knowledge-graph
5. 4Registry Layer

   The platform core: the universal registry-of-registries, entity runtime, metadata generation, localization, search core, and extension points.

   platform
6. 5Data Layer

   Open datasets, image-asset metadata, and citations — machine-readable views generated from the graph.

   lib/datasets, lib/media, lib/citations
7. 6Source Layer

   Authoritative source organizations (NASA, ESA, IAU, NOIRLab, ESO, SIMBAD, NED, …). The leaf layer; depends on nothing.

   lib/sources

Universal registry

Nothing exists outside a registry. Every collection registers with a typed descriptor and a live count.

Entity runtime

One call — resolveEntity(id) — assembles everything about an entity from every subsystem, so every client sees the same reality.

Platform components

11 reusable card types over a shared surface — composed identically by every client. Live examples: