TOPCAT - the leading astronomical catalogue software

TOPCAT及其相关库是领先的天文目录软件，已被许多大型项目采用。直到最近，由马克·泰勒博士（Dr. Mark Taylor）资助的AstroGrid基金，才把它发展到目前这个被国内和国际接受的阶段。现在这项拨款已经终止，除非继续适应不断变化的虚拟天文台标准和主要用户不断变化的需求，否则这个特别有用的软件将失去功能，并妨碍现有的项目。该提案要求提供24个月的资金，以对当前用户最要求的TOPCAT进行改进，并使其完全符合正在开发的虚拟天文台协议。这笔资金还将支持简单天文消息协议（SAMP）的工作，该协议涵盖在用户计算机上运行的不同工具之间的数据交换，以便TOPCAT可以与许多其他工具一起工作，包括微软全球望远镜和赫歇尔交互处理环境。SAMP由Taylor et al.（2009）定义，Mark Taylor对该协议的实现现在嵌入到TOPCAT和其他标准天文工具中。

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. Now that this grant has been terminated, this exceptionally useful software will lose functionality and handicap existing projects unless it continues to adapt to cope with the changing standards of the Virtual Observatory and the changing requirements of its chief users. 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.