The ESA Gaia mission will provide a multi-epoch database for a billion of objects,
including variable objects that comprise stars, active galactic nuclei and asteroids. We
highlight a few of Gaia’s properties that will benefit the study of variable objects, and
illustrate with two examples the work being done in the preparation of the data processing
and object characterization. The first example relates to the analysis of the nearly
simultaneous multi-band data of Gaia with the Principal Component Analysis techniques, and
the second example concerns the classification of Gaia time series into variability types.
The results of the ground-based processing of Gaia’s variable objects data will be made
available to the scientific community through the intermediate and final ESA releases
throughout the mission.