Is beta pictoris a typical young planetary disk system?

The gravitational effects of planets (and multi-planet systems) upon their stellar hosts have now been well established for over 80 evolved systems (Marcy et al 2000). However, in order to fully understand the many subtle discriminating physical and chemical factors that lead to the formation of planets a key question that requires answering is "at what stage can we remotely detect the presence of planets and/or planetesimals within the dust and gas disks that surround many young stars"? The star Beta Pictoris has long been forwarded as a prime example of a young (pre-)planetary system (Aumann 1984, Smith and Terille 1984), in which the disk is probably a young planetary system in the clearing-out phase and similar to that present in the Solar System some 4 billion years ago. However, one may ask if beta Pic is typical of what theorists might expect from such a system? In this brief article we present an overview of the main observational characteristics of the beta Pic disk system against, which a comparison of the properties of other recently discovered disk systems can be made (see article by C. Grady, this Conference).