TAP_CAT is the ESO Science Archive service that provides programmatic access onto the
astronomical catalogues produced by the principal investigators of ESO programmes.
The Table Access Protocol (TAP) lets you execute queries against our astronomical catalogues. The queries must adhere to the Astronomical Data Query Language (ADQL, IVOA standard).
Table Upload is not currently supported, though it is foreseen for a next release.
This service provides limited support for spatial queries; only CONTAINS and CIRCLE are supported, as in this example:
CONTAINS(point('', catalog_rightascension, catalog_declination), CIRCLE('', user_defined_rightascension, user_defined_declination, userdefined_radius))= 1.
Please note that CONTAINS(...)=0 is not supported.
A sister service (Catalog Facility: http://www.eso.org/qi) provides a web interface to the same collection of catalogues; the web interface implements a well-defined but limited query model, while instead TAP_CAT provides full ADQL support, allowing users to build their own query constraints using expressions, combining different columns, or using boolean operators (NOT, OR, etc.).
A sibling service (TAP_OBS, endpoint: http://archive.eso.org/tap_obs) exists and can be used to query the raw and reduced data, and the atmospheric measurements taken at the La Silla Paranal Observatory (including APEX).