TOPCAT: Desktop Exploration of Tabular Data for Astronomy and Beyond

TL;DR

TOPCAT is a versatile desktop application designed for interactive exploration, visualization, and analysis of large tabular datasets, primarily in astronomy but applicable to other fields, emphasizing performance and user-friendly features.

Contribution

It introduces a high-performance, open-source Java-based tool for interactive visualization and manipulation of large tabular data, adaptable across multiple scientific domains.

Findings

Handles millions of rows and hundreds of columns efficiently.

Provides diverse interactive visualization options.

Applicable beyond astronomy to other data-intensive fields.

Abstract

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.