Visualisation Tools for Very Large Amounts of Data

 

Can we perceive a billion stars? How would you go about classifying them? How quantitatively good would your analysis be? How reliable would your results be? In the coming decade an enormous amount of data will be made available to the Astronomical Community. The access to data is being addressed through initiatives such as the AVO and the NVO. With it, the analytical tools to allow serious research to take place will also need to evolve in parallel. Concepts such as Volume Visualisation and other man-machine interfaces will need to be investigated and implemented in parallel to the effort of accessing data uniformly.