Here are some screenshots of Treeview 2.0 viewing VOTable structures. They provide some idea of what can be done, it may be easier to see what's going on by playing with it.
For more general information about what Treeview is and how it works, see the main Treeview web page, and particularly the VOTable features section.
NOTE: For more sophisticated manipulation of VOTables (including editing, data analysis, plotting etc) you should look at the TOPCAT tool.
This is how a VOTable file is displayed in the first instance, with a little dish icon in the left panel and a description of top-level data about it in the right panel.
By clicking on the 'handle' icons, the VOTable structure is revealed to contain a DEFINITIONS and RESOURCE element, while the RESOURCE element contains a TABLE. Highlighting the RESOURCE gives you information about it; more detailed information on its PARAM elements could be found by clicking on the "Params" tab on the right.
By clicking on the "XML content" tab, you can see the XML which corresponds to the element in question. This option is available for all components in a VOTable.
By clicking on the TABLE icon on the left, you can see the table data content itself. It is easy to scroll around in even very large tables. In this picture, the orientation of the windows has been changed so that the node details are below, rather than to the right of, the tree.
Finally, here is a much more complicated example. Three separate VOTable files in a directory are displayed here, of which one has been partially opened up to reveal its content. It contains a number of RESOURCE elements, each of which contains one or more actual TABLEs. Shown here in the right hand panel is not the contents of the table itself, but information about its columns (FIELD elements).
Back to the main Treeview web page.