Astronomical databases, space photometry and time series analysis: Open questions

How to analyse Tera-Bytes of photometric data, and extract knowledge on variable stars? How to detect variable phenomena? How to combine different photometric bands? Which algorithm do we use to search for periods? How to characterize and classify the detected variable objects? Many questions, but certainly no definitive answers yet. We present several aspects which are at the interface of photometric surveys and variable stars. Fully automated analyses of photometric surveys are still not at an optimized level. We will take the example of a future survey, the Gaia mission project of the European Space Agency, to show different steps of a possible automated pipeline scheme. Principal component analysis can be applied to the Gaia photometric bands. We give some illustrative examples of classification methods such as Support Vector Machine, Self-Organizing Map, or Bayesian classifier.