VO Command-Line Tools Available for Testing

From: Mike Fitzpatrick <fitz-at-tucana.tuc.noao.edu>
Date: Thu, 15 Nov 2007 02:00:30 -0700

    This message is to announce a BETA release of the command-line VO tools I demonstrated at the Cambridge interop. The VO-CLI tools have a unix-like interface where command-line options dictate their behavior, but as host tools they can be used in a variety of scripting environments or web applications. These tools are based on the VOClient interface but are being released ahead of more general VOClient release while we continue its development.

        The project website is currently

                http://iraf-nvo.noao.edu/vo-cli

There, you will find download and installation details as well as a demonstration web-interface, online documentation and a guided tour in the form of typical science queries.

    Available tasks include:

            VODATA  -  Query and Access VO Images, Catalogs and Tables
        VOREGISTRY  -  Search and Resolve VO Registry Resources
          VOSESAME  -  Resolve object names to coordinates

Data queries are highly parallelized for efficiency and a key design point was the use of 'familiar' names like "USNO-B1" for VO resources and astronomer-friendly output formats such as CSV. Numerous options are available to constrain/expand searches or specify alternate output formats.

    Major development is largely complete but the tasks may not quite be ready for novice users. I would appreciate any comments or bug reports from other VO developers, and if you have a particular use in mind I'm willing to add (reasonable) new features.

    Thanks in advance for your comments.

Mike Fitzpatrick
NOAO Received on 2007-11-15Z10:01:06