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A.2.3 Locating Cone Search Service URLs

To use the coneskymatch command you need the service URL (also known as the base URL or access URL) of a cone search service to use. If you know one of these representing a service that you wish to use, you can use it directly.

If you don't, you will need to find the URL from somewhere. It is the job of the Virtual Observatory Registry to keep a record of where you can find various astronomical services, so this is where you should look.

There are various ways you can interrogate the registry; the easiest is probably to use a graphical registry search tool such as AstroGrid's VOExplorer.

It is also possible to interrogate the registry using STILTS's regquery command. See that section of the manual for details, but for instance to locate registered Cone Search services which have something to do with SDSS data, you could execute the following:

    stilts regquery query="serviceType = 'CONE' and title like '%Sloan%'" \
           ocmd="keepcols 'shortName serviceUrl'" \
           ofmt=ascii
Writing just query="serviceType = 'CONE'" with no further qualification would give you all registered cone search services.


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STILTS - Starlink Tables Infrastructure Library Tool Set
Starlink User Note256
STILTS web page: http://www.starlink.ac.uk/stilts/
Author email: m.b.taylor@bristol.ac.uk