VIALACTEA

The Milky Way as a Star Formation Engine

contact: M. Molinaro

VIALACTEA is a EU FP7 project funded within the FP7-SPACE-2013-1 call with Grant Agreement No. 607380. The above subtitle gives an hint of its goal, further details can be found on the project website.

IA2 has been involved in VIALACTEA in the technological WP5, which incorporates the activities needed to ensure that a computing infrastructure and a set of data-mining/machine-learning, visual analytics and 3D visualization tools are in place according to astronomers specifications. Specifically IA2 was in charge of creating the data archive, and access tool to it, for all of the data resources needed by the scientific work packages of the project. This has been done deploying data generated by the project members as well as data obtained by external projects and communities. The result, called VIALACTEA Knowledge Base (or simply VLKB) is a composition of data resources (images, data cubes, catalogues, numerical models, ...) and the web interfaces needed to search among and access to them.

A collection of, roughly, 1TB and 40K FITS files, alongside a DB of about 50GB including tables spanning from few thousands to some 10 million records, has been homogenized and made available through VO services (namely a TAP I/F) and custom access services (to discover, access, cut and merge FITS files). After project end, and after all publications have been produced, VLKB will be made available open to the full astrophysical community interested in galactic plane resources.