ViaLactea: a distributed visual analytic system for exploring our galactic ecosystem

Space missions and ground-based facilities collect increasingly large amounts of data that demand novel approaches to data processing, storage, visualization and analysis. Next-generation facilities, such as the Square Kilometre Array (SKA), are going to increase the volume of data at a rate higher than the ability to analyze them. Thus, new approaches combining visualization and data processing are necessary to enable astronomers to analyze their data and extract meaningful information. We present ViaLactea, an ecosystem 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 nearinfrared to the radio spectrum. We showcase a desktop application, and further present interfaces that include collaborative web solutions for multi-user support underpinned by efficient remote server CPU and GPU rendering. ViaLactea strongly promotes FAIR data and Open Science practices and is integrated within the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC).