Graphical interfaces are extremely useful tools in data mining as well
as statistical analysis of huge datasets. We describe a graphical
visualization tool, VOPlot, which can be interfaced with data in
VOTable format to form a valuable aid in scientific discovery. The
VOPlot toolkit, developed by us, is available as either a stand-alone
tool or as a web-based applet fully integrated with the VizieR catalogue
service. The VOPlot tool is very versatile, and can be used to perform
a number of graphical tasks and simple statistical estimations.
VOPlot can produce output in postscript and VOTable formats and can be
easily integrated with packages that require visualization support. It
has full two-way communication with Aladin, and has been adopted in
packages like LEDAS. We describe VOPlot and recent enhancements to
it, and demonstrate its usefulness in science applications. This paper
provides a brief description of VOPlot. The toolkit was developed by
Persistent Systems
and IUCAA
in collaboration with CDS, Strasbourg
as part of the Virtual Observatory India initiative.
The stand-alone version of VOPlot can be started using the command 'java -jar voplot.jar' on the command prompt. Java Runtime Environment (JRE) 1.3 or later is required to be installed on user's computer. The web-based version on VizieR can be started by querying a catalogue and selecting the output format as VOPlot. This requires a java plugin version 1.3.1 or later installed on the user's computer.
VOPlot supports reading from multiple VOTable documents. Data from multiple VOTables can be overlaid for comparison. Data distribution can be viewed in the form of histograms.