DISCLAIMER: These are just my opinions and should not be construed as official in any sense.

A few weeks back I was thinking about the name “Aster” and I realized that I didn’t really know what it meant. So I did some quick Googling and landed up at good old Wikipedia. It turns out that Aster is a genus of flowers.

On some more reading, it was evident that one could draw parallels between some of the characteristics of this genus and the features of Aster’s products. Here are some quotes from the article on Asteraceae:

The most evident characteristic of Asteraceae is perhaps their inflorescence: a specialised capitulum, technically called a calathid or calathidium, but generally referred to as flower head or, alternatively, simply capitulum.^[7] The capitulum is a contracted raceme composed of numerous individual sessile flowers, called the florets, all sharing the same receptacle.

In particular, a “pseudanthium (Greek for “false flower”) or flower head is a special type of inflorescence, in which several flowers are grouped together to form a flower-like structure.”

In the same spirit, the Aster nCluster database is composed of many commodity components but exposes itself a single, unified database.