Description
Space missions and ground-based facilities collect increasingly huge amounts of data that demand novel approaches to data processing, storage, visualization and finally analysis. Thanks to high precision and high resolution measurements and observations, astronomers will be able to probe the Universe with unprecedented detail. Next-generation facilities, and in particular the Square Kilometre Array (SKA), are expected to increase the volume of data at a rate higher than the ability to analyze them. To facilitate the extraction of meaningful knowledge it becomes necessary to combine data visualization and data analysis. Via Lactea Visual Analytics is a desktop application that offers the Astrophysics and Planetary communities highly interactive visual analytic interfaces enabling effective exploitation of multi-wavelength observations of the Milky Way Galactic Plane, ranging from the near-infrared to the radio spectrum. The tool combines different types of visualization to carry out analysis exploring the correlation between different kind of data, such as 2D intensity images with 3D molecular spectral cubes. It is also coupled with a dedicated data service, namely the ViaLactea Knowledge Base, that provides 2D and 3D (velocity cubes) surveys, numerical model outputs, point-like and diffuse object catalogues and allows for retrieval of all the available datasets as well as cutouts and some merging capabilities on adjacent datasets. Finally, it is integrated with the CAESAR source finder through its REST-API interface allowing users to submit and manage source extraction jobs from within the tool.
