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A.2 multicone: Multiple Cone-Search Querier

multicone is a utility which performs a cone search query for each row of an input table and concatenates the results of all these queries together into one big output table. You give the service URL for the cone search server you wish to use, and expressions (usually column names) defining how to get the search parameters (sky position and search radius) for each row of the input table. The program then goes through the input table and dispatches a cone search query to the server for each row. For each of these queries the service should respond with a VOTable containing the objects it knows about in the specified region; hopefully the columns will be the same or very similar for all the different queries since they are using the same service. The response tables aren stitched together top-to-bottom (in the same way as tcat) and the result is output.

This is in some ways like doing a positional crossmatch where one of the catalogues is local and the other is remote. Because of both the network communication and the naive algorithm however, it is only suitable if the local catalogue has a rather small number of rows.

The cone search protocol is not currently a formal IVOA standard, but it is a simple service widely implemented by catalogue servers. A description of the protocol can be found at http://us-vo.org/pubs/files/conesearch.html.

You can locate available cone search services and their service URLs by interrogating the VO Registry. One way to do this is using the regquery command. For instance, to identify registered cone search services that have something to do with Sloan data, you could execute the folowing:

    stilts regquery query="serviceType = 'CONE' and title like '%Sloan%'" \
           ocmd="keepcols 'shortName serviceUrl'" \
           ofmt=ascii
Writing just query="serviceType = 'CONE'" with no further qualification will give you all registered cone search services. See the section on regquery for more explanation.

Note that when running, multicone often generates a lot of WARNING messages. Most of these are complaining about badly formed VOTables being returned from the cone search services. STILTS does its best to work out what the service responses mean in this case, and usually makes a good enough job of it.

This command is experimental. It may be modified or renamed in a future release of STILTS.


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STILTS - Starlink Tables Infrastructure Library Tool Set
Starlink User Note 256
STILTS web page: http://www.starlink.ac.uk/stilts/
Author email: m.b.taylor@bristol.ac.uk