VOPlot: A toolkit for scientific discovery using VOTables

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(1) and IUCAA(2) in collaboration with CDS, Strasbourg as part of the Virtual Observatory India initiative.