The Gaia Era: synergy between space missions and ground based surveys

The Gaia mission is expected to provide highly accurate astrometric, photometric, and spectroscopic measurements for about $10^9$ objects. Automated classification of detected sources is a key part of the data processing. Here a few aspects of the Gaia classification process are presented. Information from other surveys at longer wavelengths, and from follow-up ground based observations will be complementary to Gaia data especially at faint magnitudes, and will offer a great opportunity to understand our Galaxy.