Peter et al,
I've added some PLASTICness to SPLAT. What it can now do is:
- receive spectra as 1-d FITS files
- receive spectra as VOTables
- transmit spectra as 1-d FITS files
- transmit spectra as VOTables
as well as the kind of generic functionality that you have in TOPCAT,
including register/unregistser, start internal/external hub,
show a little window which displays currently registered applications.
All of this is controlled from the new Interop menu in the main
SPLAT control window. The look and functionality of this menu are
very much the same as in TOPCAT.
There are an additional couple of checkboxes in this menu, to control
whether you actually want to act on received "load 1-d FITS" and/or
"load VOTable" messages, or just ignore them. The rationale for
this is that in a PLASTIC context you might have a number of
"load VOTable" messages flying around which contain things that
aren't spectra (e.g. source catalogues), and hence are unsuitable
for SPLAT; if you turn this option off you can avoid being made
to load those. Both checkboxes are currently set on by default
though. I may add something similar to TOPCAT in fact, it seems
like a sensible option to have. Future developments in the PLASTIC
protocol may provide ways of advertising one's services which make
getting sent unsuitable data like this less likely, but that's
not in place yet (or, probably, soon).
I have not yet written any documentation. I can add a suitable section
to sun243.tex if you like - tell me where in the document you'd like
it to go. In TOPCAT, the top-level Interop menu contains a
"Help on Interoperability" item (since there's no window dedicated to
to PLASTIC functionality, so no other context-sensitive help is going
to lead there - TOPCAT may one day control its PLASTICity from a
window, but not yet). If you want, I can arrange the same for SPLAT.
The PLASTIC message ID for "here is a 1-d FITS array containing a
spectrum" is "ivo://votech.org/fits/line/loadFromURL". As far as I know
(and I'm fairly confident, since I only invented it last week)
there is nobody else in the PLASTIC world who currently issues or
receives this message, but hopefully there will be in future.
In the meantime if you want to try this out you can fake it using
PlasticRequest:
% java -classpath /mbt/starjava/java/lib/plastic/plastic.jar \
uk.ac.starlink.plastic.PlasticRequest \
ivo://votech.org/fits/line/loadFromURL \
file://localhost/mbt/data/splat/splat/2df/J000254.9-284801b.fits
or transmit the data as a VOTable message (from TOPCAT or elsewhere).
I think you want GAIA to be able to send this message having extracted a
spectrum from a sky position on a cube. Should be fairly
straightforward - either DIY or point me to the right place in GAIA
(I haven't looked at cube stuff in it yet) and I can take a look.
I don't know if you want other formats of spectrum added for
send/receive - should be fairly easy to do if so.
These changes are added on the trunk, they're not intended for keoe.
Might do SoG now since the amount of additional work is probably small.
Mark
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Mark Taylor Astronomical Programmer Physics, Bristol University, UK
[log in to unmask] +44-117-928-8776 http://www.star.bris.ac.uk/~mbt/
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