arXiv subjects

Mark Taylor

Publications and source records attributed to Mark Taylor.

34 records · Page 2Linked to original sources

arXiv2017

TOPCAT: Working with Data and Working with Users

TOPCAT is a desktop application for interactive analysis of tabular data, especially source catalogues. Along with its command-line counterpart STILTS, it has been under more or less continuous development for the past 15 years and is now widely used by astronomers from project students to research scientists. This paper reviews its capabilities as a tool for working with large and small datasets, and considers some of the issues in design, implementation and user interaction that have to be tackled when developing software of this kind.

astro-ph.IM↗

arXiv2017

TOPCAT: Desktop Exploration of Tabular Data for Astronomy and Beyond

TOPCAT, the Tool for OPerations on Catalogues And Tables, is an interactive desktop application for retrieval, analysis and manipulation of tabular data, offering a powerful and flexible range of interactive visualization options amongst other features. Its visualization capabilities focus on enabling interactive exploration of large static local tables - millions of rows and hundreds of columns can easily be handled on a standard desktop or laptop machine, and various options are provided for meaningful graphical representation of such large datasets. TOPCAT has been developed in the context of astronomy, but many of its features are equally applicable to other domains. The software, which is free and open source, is written in Java, and the underlying high-performance visualisation library is suitable for re-use in other applications.

astro-ph.IM↗

arXiv2016

Astrophysics Source Code Library: Here we grow again!

The Astrophysics Source Code Library (ASCL) is a free online registry of research codes; it is indexed by ADS and Web of Science and has over 1300 code entries. Its entries are increasingly used to cite software; citations have been doubling each year since 2012 and every major astronomy journal accepts citations to the ASCL. Codes in the resource cover all aspects of astrophysics research and many programming languages are represented. In the past year, the ASCL added dashboards for users and administrators, started minting Digital Objective Identifiers (DOIs) for software it houses, and added metadata fields requested by users. This presentation covers the ASCL's growth in the past year and the opportunities afforded it as one of the few domain libraries for science research codes.

astro-ph.IM↗

arXiv2016

Implementing Ideas for Improving Software Citation and Credit

Improving software citation and credit continues to be a topic of interest across and within many disciplines, with numerous efforts underway. In this Birds of a Feather (BoF) session, we started with a list of actionable ideas from last year's BoF and other similar efforts and worked alone or in small groups to begin implementing them. Work was captured in a common Google document; the session organizers will disseminate or otherwise put this information to use in or for the community in collaboration with those who contributed.

astro-ph.IM↗

arXiv2015

Improving Software Citation and Credit

The past year has seen movement on several fronts for improving software citation, including the Center for Open Science's Transparency and Openness Promotion (TOP) Guidelines, the Software Publishing Special Interest Group that was started at January's AAS meeting in Seattle at the request of that organization's Working Group on Astronomical Software, a Sloan-sponsored meeting at GitHub in San Francisco to begin work on a cohesive research software citation-enabling platform, the work of Force11 to "transform and improve" research communication, and WSSSPE's ongoing efforts that include software publication, citation, credit, and sustainability. Brief reports on these efforts were shared at the BoF, after which participants discussed ideas for improving software citation, generating a list of recommendations to the community of software authors, journal publishers, ADS, and research authors. The discussion, recommendations, and feedback will help form recommendations for software citation to those publishers represented in the Software Publishing Special Interest Group and the broader community.

cs.DL↗

arXiv2015

TOPCAT's TAP Client

TAP, the Table Access Protocol, is a Virtual Observatory (VO) protocol for executing queries in remote relational databases using ADQL, an SQL-like query language. It is one of the most powerful components of the VO, but also one of the most complex to use, with an extensive stack of associated standards. We present here recent improvements to the client and GUI for interacting with TAP services from the TOPCAT table analysis tool. As well as managing query submission and result retrieval, the GUI attempts to provide the user with as much help as possible in locating services, understanding service metadata and capabilities, and constructing correct and useful ADQL queries. The implementation and design are, unlike previous versions, both usable and performant even for the largest TAP services.

astro-ph.IM↗

arXiv2015

MOC - HEALPix Multi-Order Coverage map Version 1.0

This document describes the Multi-Order Coverage map method (MOC) to specify arbitrary sky regions. The goal is to be able to provide a very fast comparison mechanism between coverage maps. The mechanism is based on the HEALPix sky tessellation algorithm. It is essentially a simple way to map regions of the sky into hierarchically grouped predefined cells.

astro-ph.IM↗

arXiv2015

Client Interfaces to the Virtual Observatory Registry

The Virtual Observatory Registry is a distributed directory of information systems and other resources relevant to astronomy. To make it useful, facilities to query that directory must be provided to humans and machines alike. This article reviews the development and status of such facilities, also considering the lessons learnt from about a decade of experience with Registry interfaces. After a brief outline of the history of the standards development, it describes the use of Registry interfaces in some popular clients as well as dedicated UIs for interrogating the Registry. It continues with a thorough discussion of the design of the two most recent Registry interface standards, RegTAP on the one hand and a full-text-based interface on the other hand. The article finally lays out some of the less obvious conventions that emerged in the interaction between providers of registry records and Registry users as well as remaining challenges and current developments.

astro-ph.IM↗

arXiv2014

Astrophysics Source Code Library Enhancements

The Astrophysics Source Code Library (ASCL; ascl.net) is a free online registry of codes used in astronomy research; it currently contains over 900 codes and is indexed by ADS. The ASCL has recently moved a new infrastructure into production. The new site provides a true database for the code entries and integrates the WordPress news and information pages and the discussion forum into one site. Previous capabilities are retained and permalinks to ascl.net continue to work. This improvement offers more functionality and flexibility than the previous site, is easier to maintain, and offers new possibilities for collaboration. This presentation covers these recent changes to the ASCL.

astro-ph.IM↗

arXiv2014

Visualising Large Datasets in TOPCAT v4

TOPCAT is a widely used desktop application for manipulation of astronomical catalogues and other tables, which has long provided fast interactive visualisation features including 1, 2 and 3-d plots, multiple datasets, linked views, color coding, transparency and more. In Version 4 a new plotting library has been written from scratch to deliver new and enhanced visualisation capabilities. This paper describes some of the considerations in the design and implementation, particularly in regard to providing comprehensible interactive visualisation for multi-million point datasets.

astro-ph.IM↗

arXiv2014

IVOA Recommendation: TAPRegExt: a VOResource Schema Extension for Describing TAP Services

This document describes an XML encoding standard for metadata about services implementing the table access protocol TAP [TAP], referred to as TAPRegExt. Instance documents are part of the service's registry record or can be obtained from the service itself. They deliver information to both humans and software on the languages, output formats, and upload methods supported by the service, as well as data models implemented by the exposed tables, optional language features, and certain limits enforced by the service.

astro-ph.IM↗

arXiv2014

IVOA Recommendation: DALI: Data Access Layer Interface Version 1.0

This document describes the Data Access Layer Interface (DALI). DALI defines the base web service interface common to all Data Access Layer (DAL) services. This standard defines the behaviour of common resources, the meaning and use of common parameters, success and error responses, and DAL service registration. The goal of this specification is to define the common elements that are shared across DAL services in order to foster consistency across concrete DAL service specifications and to enable standard re-usable client and service implementations and libraries to be written and widely adopted.

astro-ph.IM↗

arXiv2013

Ideas for Advancing Code Sharing (A Different Kind of Hack Day)

How do we as a community encourage the reuse of software for telescope operations, data processing, and calibration? How can we support making codes used in research available for others to examine? Continuing the discussion from last year Bring out your codes! BoF session, participants separated into groups to brainstorm ideas to mitigate factors which inhibit code sharing and nurture those which encourage code sharing. The BoF concluded with the sharing of ideas that arose from the brainstorming sessions and a brief summary by the moderator.

astro-ph.IM↗

arXiv2013

The Astrophysics Source Code Library: Where do we go from here?

The Astrophysics Source Code Library, started in 1999, has in the past three years grown from a repository for 40 codes to a registry of over 700 codes that are now indexed by ADS. What comes next? We examine the future of the ASCL, the challenges facing it, the rationale behind its practices, and the need to balance what we might do with what we have the resources to accomplish.

astro-ph.IM↗

arXiv2009

Intermittency and Thermalization in Turbulence

A dissipation rate, which grows faster than any power of the wave number in Fourier space, may be scaled to lead a hydrodynamic system {\it actually} or {\it potentially} converge to its Galerkin truncation. Actual convergence we name for the asymptotic truncation at a finite wavenumber $k_G$ above which modes have no dynamics; and, we define potential convergence for the truncation at $k_G$ which, however, grows without bound. Both types of convergence can be obtained with the dissipation rate $μ[cosh(k/k_c)-1]$ who behaves as $k^2$ (newtonian) and $\exp\{k/k_c\}$ for small and large $k/k_c$ respectively. Competition physics of cascade, thermalization and dissipation are discussed with numerical Navier-Stokes turbulence, emphasizing on the intermittency growth.

nlin.CD↗

arXiv2007

Anisotropic small-scale constraints on energy in rotating stratified turbulence

Rapidly rotating, stably stratified three-dimensional inviscid flows conserve both energy and potential enstrophy. We show that in such flows, the forward cascade of potential enstrophy imposes anisotropic constraints on the wavenumber distribution of kinetic and potential energy. The horizontal kinetic energy is suppressed in the large, nearly horizontal wave modes, and should decay with the horizontal wavenumber as $k_h^{-3}$. The potential energy is suppressed in the large, nearly vertical wave modes, and should decay with the vertical wavenumber as $k_z^{-3}$. These results augment the only other exact prediction for the scaling of energy spectra due to constraints by potential enstrophy obtained by Charney (J. Atmos. Sci. 28, 1087 (1971)), who showed that in the quasi-geostrophic approximation for rotating stratified flows, the energy spectra must scale isotropically with total wavenumber as $k^{-3}$. We test our predicted scaling estimates using resolved numerical simulations of the Boussinesq equations in the relevant parameter regimes, and find reasonable agreement.

nlin.CD↗