TOPCAT: Desktop Exploration of Tabular Data for Astronomy and Beyond

• Main Author: Mark Taylor
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: MDPI AG 2017-06-01
• Series: Informatics
• Subjects: interactive visualization; astronomy; tabular data; exploratory data analysis
• Online Access: http://www.mdpi.com/2227-9709/4/3/18

TOPCAT, the Tool for OPerations on Catalogues And Tables, is an interactive desktop application for retrieval, analysis and manipulation of tabular data, offering a powerful and flexible range of interactive visualization options amongst other features. Its visualization capabilities focus on enabling interactive exploration of large static local tables—millions of rows and hundreds of columns can easily be handled on a standard desktop or laptop machine, and various options are provided for meaningful graphical representation of such large datasets. TOPCAT has been developed in the context of astronomy, but many of its features are equally applicable to other domains. The software, which is free and open source, is written in Java, and the underlying high-performance visualisation library is suitable for re-use in other applications.