TOPCAT

Tool for OPerations on Catalogues And Tables

Does what you want with tables

• What is TOPCAT?
• Features
• Screenshots
• Documentation
• Frequently Asked Questions
• Mailing Lists
• Downloads
• Jar File
• WebStart
• Starjava
• MacOS X
• Version history — Version 4.3-2 released 27 November 2015
• Further information

What is TOPCAT?

TOPCAT is an interactive graphical viewer and editor for tabular data. Its aim is to provide most of the facilities that astronomers need for analysis and manipulation of source catalogues and other tables, though it can be used for non-astronomical data as well. It understands a number of different astronomically important formats (including FITS, VOTable and CDF) and more formats can be added.

It offers a variety of ways to view and analyse tables, including a browser for the cell data themselves, viewers for information about table and column metadata, and facilities for sophisticated interactive 1-, 2-, 3- and higher-dimensional visualisation, calculating statistics and joining tables using flexible matching algorithms. Using a powerful and extensible Java-based expression language new columns can be defined and row subsets selected for separate analysis. Table data and metadata can be edited and the resulting modified table can be written out in a wide range of output formats.

It is a stand-alone application which works quite happily with no network connection. However, because it uses Virtual Observatory (VO) standards, it can cooperate smoothly with other tools, services and datasets in the VO world and beyond.

The program is written in pure Java and available under the GNU General Public Licence. It has been developed mostly in the UK within various UK and Euro-VO projects (Starlink, AstroGrid, VOTech, AIDA, GAVO, GENIUS, DPAC) and under PPARC and STFC grants. Its underlying table processing facilities are provided by the related library STIL.

Features

The following is a list of the program's main capabilities. The hyperlinks are to the relevant parts of the user document.

• Fast access to large datasets (millions of rows/hundreds of columns)
• View/edit table data in a scrollable browser
• View/edit table and column metadata
• Re-order and hide/reveal columns
• Insert 'synthetic' columns defined by algebraic expression
• Sort rows on the values in a given column
• Define row subsets in various ways
• View interactively and export configurable plots of column-based quantities against each other distinguishing different data sets:
  • Plot types are histogram, plane, sky, cube, sphere, time
  • Features include variable transparency, error bars, point labelling, colour axes, all-sky plots, configurable density shading, vectors, ellipses, contours, analytic functions, plain text/LaTeX axis annotation, ...
• Calculate statistics on each column for some or all rows
• Perform flexible and fast matching of rows in the same or different tables
• Concatenate the rows of existing tables to create new ones
• Cause various things to happen when a row or plotted point is selected.
• Communicate with other applications using SAMP or PLASTIC
• Acquire tables from a file (local disk, MySpace, SRB), URL, or SQL query
• Communicate with external VO and non-VO data services, including TAP, VizieR, CDS X-Match, cone search, SIA or SSA
• Perform multiple (per-row) cone search, SIA or SSA queries, to join a local to a remote catalogue or image/spectrum archive.
• Write modified tables out in original or different format to file (local disk, MySpace, SRB) or an SQL database
• Comprehensive documentation supplied within the application or off-line

Supported table input formats include:

• FITS TABLE (ASCII table) or BINTABLE (binary table) extensions
• VOTables in any of the format variants (TABLEDATA, FITS, BINARY, BINARY2) or versions
• ASCII tables in a number of variations
• CDF files
• Comma-Separated Values
• Results of SQL queries on relational databases
• IPAC format
• GBIN files

• FITS BINTABLE (binary table)
• VOTables in any of the format variants (TABLEDATA, FITS, BINARY, BINARY2) or versions
• Plain ASCII text
• Comma-Separated Values
• New table exported to an SQL-compatible relational database
• IPAC format
• HTML TABLE element
• LaTeX tabular environment

Documentation

Full tutorial and reference documentation for TOPCAT is provided by SUN/253, the user document. This is available within the program at runtime via the context-sensitive and searchable help system, or in the following forms within the distribution or on the web:

• Multi-page HTML document
• Single-page HTML document
• Zipped HTML document (4.4M)
• PDF document (4.2M)

Frequently Asked Questions

A list of frequently asked questions is available. If you want to suggest additional questions and/or answers, please get in touch.

• FAQ

Mailing Lists

Two mailing lists are in use for TOPCAT and related software:

• topcat-user@jiscmail.ac.uk: Public list for questions, answers, discussions, bugs, comments, ...
• topcat-announce@bristol.ac.uk: Low-volume read-only list for release announcements and news items.

If you have queries or support enquiries you are encouraged to send them to topcat-user. However, I can still answer mail directly to me if you prefer that.

Screenshots

You can see screenshots of TOPCAT in action in the following places:

• The TOPCAT gallery is a page containing lots of window screenshots
• The TOPCAT V4 graphics page showcases some features of the new-style plotting windows introduced in version 4 (March 2013)
• The TOPCAT V3 screenshots page showcases some of the features introduced at version 3 (August 2007)
• SUN/253's windows appendix details all of TOPCAT's windows with illustrations
• There's a (somewhat outdated) montage of some of the windows TOPCAT provides below; click on it for a full size version

Downloads

TOPCAT is written in the Java language using the Java 2 Standard Edition version 1.5 and should run on any J2SE 1.5 or more recent system. This means it can be run on a wide range of platforms, without requiring any recompilation - you just need to ensure that you have a suitable Java Runtime Environment (JRE). If you don't have Java installed, or have an unsuitable version, you can obtain it for Linux, Solaris and MS Windows from Oracle's web site (you only need the "JRE" rather than the "SDK" download, unless you will be doing development work). J2SE Runtime Enviroments (sometimes called JVM or Java Virtual Machines) for other platforms may be available from operating system vendors; in particular TOPCAT is known to run on MacOS X.

Note: Various open-source java implementations (GNU's gij, OpenJDK-based implementations), sometimes bundled with Linux distributions, have not always worked well, at least historically, though OpenJDK seems to be a lot better recently. If you have one of these (try java -version to find out) and are experiencing trouble with TOPCAT, you are advised to get the Oracle implementation instead.

Having got Java, There are several ways to download TOPCAT, described in rough order of advisability in the following subsections. More information on how to run the program having obtained it can be found in SUN/253's section on Invoking TOPCAT.

Standalone Jar File

The most convenient form for downloading is to pick up a single Jar file containing the required classes:

• topcat-full.jar (28.1M) - core facilities plus some optional extras
• topcat-lite.jar (21.5M) - core facilities

(Note: if you try to download these directly your browser may say something about a failed security check. Make sure that you save it to a file, for instance by right-clicking in Firefox).

On Unix-like operating systems, download one or other of these jar files and the startup script topcat into the same directory, then "chmod +x topcat", and you can just run the command:

   topcat

On non-Unix systems the script won't work, and you can use a command like:

   java -jar topcat-*.jar

or invoke it in some other system-dependent way such as by clicking on it.

For many users, topcat-lite will provide all the features they need. The optional extras provided by topcat-full include:

• Treeview-like hierarchy browsing
• SoG image viewer (though you still need JAI for it to work)
• MySpace and SRB remote file browsing for table load/save

Even topcat-full lacks a few of the niche features (proper coordinate handling in SoG, NDF viewing in hierachy view), since these require native libraries; for these you will need the Full Starjava installation described below.

WebStart

WebStart is a Java technology which enables one-click download, installation, updating and invocation of Java applications over the web. If you have Java's WebStart installed, you can install and invoke TOPCAT in one click from one of the following links:

• Webstart invocation: topcat-full (28.1M), topcat-lite (21.5M)

See the comments in the previous item for the difference between topcat-lite and topcat-full.

MacOS X

If you have an Apple Mac, you can pick up the following for easy installation:

topcat-full.dmg (34.4M)

A couple of FAQ entries are relevant: how to set flags for memory usage etc and problem with "damaged" dmg file.

Full Starjava Installation

If you want the most comprehensive installation then download and unpack the full starjava tree in one of the following forms:

• starjava compressed tar archive (144.3M)
• starjava zip archive (144.5M)

These archives include related applications such as SPLAT, SoG and Treeview. You can run TOPCAT using the starjava/bin/topcat script (Unix) or by running java -jar starjava/lib/topcat/topcat.jar.

Version History

The most recent public release of TOPCAT is version 4.3-2, released 27 November 2015.

For a detailed history of the changes in this and previous releases, see the

Full Version History

Further Information

STILTS

TOPCAT's sister package is STILTS, the STIL Tool Set. STILTS offers many of the same facilities as TOPCAT (and some additional ones) in the form of command-line tools, which can be invoked from the Unix/DOS command-line prompt, or from Jython.

Other Resources relating to the code

• STIL web page for the table handling classes
• Javadocs for TOPCAT classes (though this API is not intended for public use)
• Source code zip file for the TOPCAT classes (see FAQ)
• github page for git source code repository (see FAQ)
• FTP archive containing old, and perhaps pre-release versions of TOPCAT

Examples and Tutorials

• Here is a demo video by Niall Deacon (Hawaii), originally posted on AstroBetter.
• Here is a nice example/tutorial by Simon Murphy (RSAA/ANU)
• Here is a tutorial script used for a seminar at ARI Heidelberg
• Here are tutorials on v4.1 plotting and matching from a Gaia Brown Dwarfs meeting in 2014
• And an ADQL tutorial by Simon Murphy (again, now ARI)
• Some general VO tutorials from Euro-VO are also relevant

Acknowledgements

• The code relies on many bits of third-party software, and advice and contributions from many users; credit for some of these can be found in the Acknowledgements section of the manual.
• If you use this software in published work, then citing paper 2005ASPC..347...29T would be appreciated.

TOPCAT is currently (2015) under active development, and I'm very open to user feedback. Any comments, questions, requests, bugs etc, please either post to the topcat-user list or contact me direct:

• Author: Mark Taylor, Astrophysics Group, Physics Department, Bristol University
• Email: m.b.taylor@bristol.ac.uk
• TOPCAT WWW page: www.starlink.ac.uk/topcat/

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