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Paper: Chapter 21: Programmatic Interfaces—STILTS
Volume: 382, The National Virtual Observatory: Tools and Techniques for Astronomical Research
Page: 203
Authors: Fitzpatrick, M.J.
Abstract: STILTS is the Starlink Tables Infrastructure Library Tool Set developed by Mark Taylor of the former Starlink Project. STILTS is a command-line tool (see the $NVOSS_HOME/bin/stilts command) providing access to the same functionality driving the TOPCAT application and can be run using either the STILTS-specific jar file, or the more general TOPCAT jar file (both are available in the $NVOSS_HOME/java/lib directory and are included in the default software environment classpath). The heart of both STILTS and TOPCAT is the STIL Java library. STIL is designed to efficiently handle the input, output and processing of very large tabular datasets and the STILTS task interface makes it an ideal tool for the scripting environment. Multiple formats are supported (including FITS Binary Tables, VOTable, CSV, SQL databases and ASCII, amongst others) and while some tools will generically handle all supported formats, others are specific to the VOTable format. Converting a VOTable to a more script-friendly format is the first thing most users will encounter, but there are many other useful tools as well.
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