Topcat integration

To integrate Tap Queries into Astrotaverna, we based on the project ([TOPCAT] (http://www.star.bris.ac.uk/~mbt/topcat/#install)).

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.

The posible solutions to integration was:

• Defining dependencies
• Integrating the source code

We choose the last one because it was the easier way to reuse the functionality and the GUI in a efficient way. We just take the packages necessaries for the voservices query creation.

The source code is in the git repository: topcat source code

TopCat 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) and under PPARC and STFC grants. Its underlying table processing facilities are provided by the related library STIL.