TOPCAT and SAMP: developing the leading astronomical catalogue software

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TOPCAT, with its associated libraries, is the leading astronomical catalogue software, and has been adopted by many large-scale projects. Its development to this stage of national and international acceptance, by Dr. Mark Taylor, was funded until recently by the AstroGrid grant, and has been continued under an urgency grant. STFC support is due to run out in late 2010, when this exceptionally useful software will begin to become obsolete in the face of the increasing requirements from existing projects using front-rank facilities and combining multi-wavelength catalogues. It must continue to adapt to cope with the changing standards of the Virtual Observatory and the changing requirements of its chief users. In particular, it is intended to add a Python interface, to improve useability and aid integration into large-scale catalogue-handling pipelines of the type that are increasingly being used for major astronomical (and other) projects. This proposal requests funding for 24 months to provide the improvements to TOPCAT most requested by its current users and to keep it fully compliant with the developing Virtual Observatory protocols. The funding will also support work on the Simple Astronomical Messaging Protocol, SAMP, which covers data exchange between different tools running on a user's computer, so that TOPCAT can work with many other tools, including the Microsoft World-Wide Telescope and the Herschel Interactive Processing Environment. SAMP was defined by Taylor et al. (2009), and Mark Taylor's implementations of the protocol are now embedded in TOPCAT and other standard astronomical tools.