Introduction

VisIVO (Visualization Interface for the Virtual Observatory) performs multi-dimensional data analysis and knowledge discovery of a-priori unknown relationships between multi-variate and complex datasets in Astrophysics. VisIVO development started within the activities of the Virtual Observatory framework. It supplies users with functionality to render meaningfully highly-complex, large-scale datasets and create movies of such views using distributed computing infrastructures.

VisIVO provides an integrated suite of tools and services that can also be used in other scientific fields. The VisIVO suite offers a variety of flavours as follows:

• VisIVO Server a platform for high performance visualization.

• VisIVO Library for running complex workflows on DCI, clouds and HPC infrastructures to efficiently produce complex views of the dataset and full movies directly with the user-code internal data representation (i.e. without the need to create intermediate files).

• VisIVO ViaLactea Visual Analytics (VLVA), developed within the ViaLactea project, which allows to exploit a combination of all new-generation surveys of the Galactic Plane to analyze star forming regions of the Milky Way.

• VisIVO ViaLactea Web (VLW), a work-in-progress simplified web version of the VLVA, developed in collaboration with University of Portsmouth (UK) providing an efficient visualisation (GPU and CPU rendering) on remote server.

VisIVO technologies have been demonstrated as success stories in numerous relevant multidisciplinary environments, and Projects. As an open access software, significant interest in its usage has been shown from all over the world (evident by the number of hits on the websites) and several scientists from different domains (e.g. Nuclear Physics) have produced visualisations of their data (simulations or observational datasets).

The suite is maintained by INAF-Astrophysical Observatory of Catania and is continuously enriched with several international collaborations.