Atomic and Molecular Databases« Open Science for better science and a sustainable world »

The building of on-line atomic and molecular databases for astrophysics and for other applications fields have started from the beginning of the internet. Those have encompassed different forms:  private databases exposing their own data, databases providing collected data from the refereed literature, databases providing evaluated compilation, databases providing repositories for individuals to deposit their data and so on. Those were and are the replacement for literature compilations with the goal to provide a better data service to the users communities. That work involved not only scientific work on the data, but also the characterization of the data, which could be seen as the start of the “standardization” of metadata and of the relations between metadata, as it has recently been developed in different communities. 

This talk aims at providing an overview of the atomic and molecular databases ecosystem which is available to the astrophysical community. It will describe the issues linked to format and data descriptions, to data exchanges and usage in astrophysical tools and codes. It will outline the various organizations of communities that provide access to atomic and molecular data and databases. Finally it will address long term sustainability issues linked to the scientific quality of the provided data and to their long term availability.

Acknowledgement : This talk is fueled by the work performed by different actors over the years : databases, institutions such as the IAEA, the NIST, the IUPAC, infrastructures such as the VAMDC and more recently from  the IAU B5 commission and its working groups, not forgetting the past history of other commissions linked to atomic and molecular data at the IAU.

Acronyms : IAEA : International Atomic Energy Agency (iaea.org); NIST : National Institute of Standards and Technology (www.nist.gov);  IUPAC : International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (iupac.org);  VAMDC : Virtual Atomic and Molecular Data Centre (vamdc.org); B5 commission on Laboratory Astrophysics