STILTS initial release

[Mark Taylor]

Dear VOers,

This is to announce the first (beta) release of STILTS,
the Starlink Tables Infrastructure Library Tool Set.

STILTS is a package of command-line table processing tools.
Like TOPCAT, it is based on STIL, Starlink's generic table/VOTable I/O
and processing library.  Amongst other things, it provides non-graphical
equivalents of a number of the functions available within TOPCAT.
It also provides some commands specifically for handling VOTable
documents.

The current list of commands is:

   tcopy - Table format converter
       Converts between many different table formats, including FITS,
       VOTable (all encodings), ASCII and SQL.  Replaces Tablecopy.

   tpipe - Generic table pipeline utility
       Provides many flexible table processing functions such as row
       selection, sorting, column rearrangement, statistics,
       algebraic cell manipulation etc.

   votcopy - VOTable encoding translator
       Copies a VOTable document converting between TABLEDATA, BINARY
       and FITS data encoding formats as requested.

   votlint - VOTable validity checker
       Checks a VOTable document for validity and sensibleness; tests
       many things that validating against a schema/DTD won't pick up.

All these tools work (on the whole) in streaming mode, and so are
suitable for use with very large tables.

I hope this will be of interest to some of you.  I'd particularly
like to recommend to software authors and data centres that they
take a look at votlint to test that the VOTables they are generating
are error free (most don't seem to be!).

The STILTS web page, which contains an overview, downloads, and
full documentation is at

    http://www.starlink.ac.uk/stilts/

Please get in touch if you have any comments or queries.  I'll be
available to discuss this package at the IVOA interop meeting in Kyoto.

Mark Taylor
Starlink project

-- 
Mark Taylor    Starlink Programmer     Physics,  Bristol University, UK
m.b.taylor at bris.ac.uk +44-117-928-8776 http://www.star.bris.ac.uk/~mbt/