[2] Although a general purpose tool capable of handling large and sparse datasets with correlation functionality its specialist application area is astronomy and it was initially designed to support virtual observatories.

Taylor acknowledges inspiration for some features from Mirage from Bell Labs and VOPlot from VO-India.

[10] While TOPCAT is unable to visualise catalogues as a set of vectors it does have capabilities to explore correlations in two and three dimensional scatter plots.

[12] TOPCAT is used in training for use of virtual observatories,[13][14] including access via the Astronomical Data Query Language (ADQL).

[15] Applications using TOPCAT include MultiDark, a database for results from cosmological simulations.