Content-type: text/html Manpage of VOTOPIC

VOTOPIC

Section: User Commands (1)
Updated: Feb 2013
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NAME

votopic - Query for data from resources specified by topic keyword

SYNOPSIS

votopic [<opts>] <topic> { <object> | <ra> <dec> } [ <size> ]

OPTIONS

The votopic application accepts the following options:

-h, --help: Print a help summary to the terminal and exit. No processing is done following this flag.
All VODATA task options

DESCRIPTION

The votopic task is a convenience application built on top of the vodata and voregistry applications. Its main purpose is to allow a query for data using logical concepts (e.g. "galaxies", "observation logs") rather than a specific list of resources. This should limit the number of resources that need to be queried when querying all data services and return more relevant results. This is done by using the <topic> argument as a keyword search value for the Registry, the resulting resource list is then used as input for the VODATA task to query only those resources returned by the Registry query at the position listed by the <object>fP or <ra> <dec> position. As an example, the topic 'AGN' may be used to query only those resources that claim to have something to do with AGN as opposed to the many hundreds or thousands more that may not contain data for that field at all but would be queried anyway using the more generalized approach of VODATA.

The actual effectiveness or suitability of this approach will depend greatly on the keywords (i.e. topic) chosen and the aims of a specific query.

For a complete list of options and a description of the task behavior, see the VODATA and VOREGISTRY man page.

RETURN STATUS

On exit the votopic task will return a zero indicating success, or a one indicating an error.

EXAMPLES

1) Query for catalog data of A2712 from Resources related to gravitational lensing:

  % votopic -t catalog lens A2712

This query is against only 142 services (data found for 128), a similar query against ALL catalog services would require more than 8000 services to be queried. This is equivalent to the commands

  % voregistry -t catalog -d -o lens.xml lens 
  % vodata lens.xml A2712

Here the 'lens.xml' output file contains the resources to be queried, the '-d' flag says to return only DAL services, the '-t' flag resticts by service type. In the call to VODATA, the 'lens.xml' file defines the 142 resources to be queried, the contraint to service type and DAL-only was done in the registry query that produced the file.

BUGS

No known bugs with this release.

Revision History

Feb 2013 - First public release

Author

Michael Fitzpatrick (fitz@noao.edu), Feb 2013

This document was created by man2html, using the manual pages.
Time: 05:13:27 GMT, April 14, 2013