VO Command-Line Tools Available for Testing

[Mike Fitzpatrick]

    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