STILTS

Starlink Tables Infrastructure Library Tool Set

Latest (see Version History)

Version 2.4 released 27 Oct 2011

New: Additional crossmatch criteria: Per-object circular (Nd_err) and elliptical (skyellipse, 2d_ellipse) object crossmatching now available.
New: Asymmetric crossmatching: New best1 and best2 values for find parameter in tmatch2 etc makes matching easier in crowded fields.
New: Functions in degrees: Most angular expression language functions now available with degrees not just radians (CoordsDegrees, TrigDegrees).

What is STILTS?
Commands
Documentation
Mailing Lists
Downloads
Further Information

What is STILTS?

The STIL Tool Set is a set of command-line tools based on STIL, the Starlink Tables Infrastructure Library. It deals with the processing of tabular data; the package has been designed for, but is not restricted to, astronomical tables such as object catalogues. Some of the tools are generic and can work with multiple formats (including FITS, VOTable, CSV, SQL and ASCII), and others are specific to the VOTable format. In some ways, STILTS forms the command-line counterpart of the GUI table analysis tool TOPCAT. The package is robust, fully documented, and designed for efficiency, especially with very large datasets.

Facilities offered include:

format conversion
crossmatching
plotting
column calculation and rearrangement
row selections
data and metadata manipulation and display
sorting
statistical calculations
histogram calculation
data validation
VO service access

A powerful and extensible expression language is used for specifying data calculations. These facilities can be put together in very flexible and efficient ways.

For tasks in which the data can be streamed, the size of table STILTS can process is effectively unlimited. For other tasks, tables of a few million rows usually do not present a problem.

STILTS is written in pure Java (J2SE1.5 or later), and can be run from the command line or from Jython, or embedded into java applications. It is released under the GPL.

Commands

STILTS currently consists of ten generic table processing commands:

tcopy - Table format converter
tpipe - Generic table pipeline processing utility
tmatch2, tskymatch2 - Two-table crossmatchers
tmatch1 - Intra-table crossmatcher
tmatchn - Multi-table crossmatcher
tjoin - Trivial side-by-side multiple-table joiner
tcube - N-dimensional histogram calculator
tcat, tcatn - Multiple-table concatenaters
tmulti, tmultin - Multiple-table container writers

three plotting commands:

plot2d - 2d scatter plot
plot3d - 3d scatter plot
plothist - Histogram plot

two VOTable-specific commands:

votcopy - VOTable encoding translator
votlint - VOTable validity checker

five Virtual Observatory service access commands:

regquery - Registry Query
coneskymatch (formerly multicone) - Match local table with one behind a Cone Search/SIA/SSA service
tapquery, tapresume - TAP service clients
taplint - TAP service test suite

three SQL-specific commands:

sqlskymatch (formerly sqlcone) - Match local table with one in an SQL database
sqlclient - JDBC-based SQL command-line client
sqlupdate - Updates data in existing cells of an RDBMS table

and three miscellaneous items:

server - HTTP server which executes STILTS commands
calc - Quick expression evaluator
funcs - Documentation browser for expression language functions

See also the Commands by Category section of the manual.

More commands and facilities may be added in the future.

Documentation

The STILTS documentatation is provided in the user document, SUN/256. This is available in the following formats:

Mailing Lists

Two mailing lists exist for STILTS, TOPCAT and related software:

topcat-user@bristol.ac.uk: Public list for questions, answers, discussions, bugs, comments, ...
topcat-announce@bristol.ac.uk: Low-volume read-only list for release announcements and news items.

To subscribe, send a message with the Subject line "subscribe topcat-user" or "subscribe topcat-announce" to sympa@sympa.bristol.ac.uk, or use the Subscribe link on the pages linked above. Archives are available from those pages. There is a bit more information on the mailing list page.

If you have queries or support enquiries you are encouraged to send them to topcat-user. However, I'm still happy to answer mail directly to me if you prefer that.

Downloads

The easiest way to download STILTS is from the following links:

Software jar file stilts.jar (6.5M)
Invocation script stilts
Documentation zip file (1.2M)
Source code zip file (1.7M)
Zip archive of individual jar files stilts_jars.zip (6.3M) (may be useful for those using STILTS classes as a library)
Source code subversion svn web interface or svn checkout https://starjava.jach.hawaii.edu/svn/trunk (see ttools package)
Archive of previous, and perhaps pre-release versions

The stilts.jar file contains all the classes required to run STILTS. If you run "java -jar stilts.jar" you will see a help message; on Unix you also have the choice of downloading the stilts script into the same directory and using that for convenience. For more details on invoking the tools, read SUN/256.

It is also possible to run STILTS commands against an installation of the full Starjava set or of TOPCAT (run "topcat -stilts ...") since the relevant classes are present in each case.

The current release of STILTS is v2.4, released 27 October 2011. The full Version History is available in the user document.

Further Information

Products related to STILTS are:

STIL: Public API underlying the functions of STILTS
TOPCAT: Graphical user tool for interactive table manipulation

If you have any comments, questions, requests, bugs etc, please either post to the topcat-user list or contact me direct:

Author: Mark Taylor, Astrophysics Group, Physics Department, Bristol University
Email: m.b.taylor@bristol.ac.uk
STILTS WWW page: http://www.starlink.ac.uk/stilts/

And finally...

Q: What do you get if you combine all the Starlink Java table handling applications?
A: TOPCAT STILTS.
Thanks to Proporta and Malcolm Currie for that.