B Release Notes

This is TOPCAT, Tool for OPerations on Catalogues And Tables. It is a general purpose viewer and editor for astronomical tabular data developed within the UK Starlink project.

Author
Mark Taylor (Starlink, Bristol University)
Email
m.b.taylor@bristol.ac.uk
WWW
http://www.starlink.ac.uk/topcat/
User comments, suggestions, requests and bug reports to the above address are welcomed.

Related software products are

STIL
The Starlink Tables Infrastructure Library, which provides the table handling classes on which TOPCAT is based.
STILTS
The STIL Tool Set, which provides some command-line tools based on STIL. The intention is that this should be a non-graphical counterpart to TOPCAT, providing many of the same facilities (matching, row selection, format conversion etc) but in a form which can be incorporated into scripts, web services, etc. The current release only contains a few of these features however.

The Starlink project under which TOPCAT and friends have been developed has been shut down as of July 2005. At the time of writing, this means that there is currently no provision for continued support and development of the software. The author is currently pursuing possibilities for further funding, but it's not yet clear whether or how these will work out. Probably at least a minimal level of support will continue to be available, one way or another. The email address above may or may not continue to be active; check the TOPCAT web page for news in the future.