F-VAMDC is the French partner of the VAMDC international consortium (Virtual Atomic and Molecular Data Center), a cutting-edge technical infrastructure that enables unified and interoperable querying of atomic and molecular databases. This infrastructure currently federates 37 databases, 90% of which are used in astrophysics, with applications in planetology and atmospheric physics. F-VAMDC hosts and maintains 14 French databases from several partner observatories (OBSPM, OASU, OSU THETA, OMP) and maintains the essential technical components of the international consortium, including the service’s registries, the web portal, and the database of chemical species.
F-VAMDC’s activities are wide-ranging : developing and maintaining the interoperability standards (https://vamdc.org/standards) in collaboration with IVOA, creating software tools for users (SPECTCOL - , pyVAMDC), verifying the quality of distributed data , and providing user support. F-VAMDC also plays a major role in the convergence of European research infrastructures and in open science initiatives, notably through active participation in the French National Plan for Open Science (https://www.ouvrirlascience.fr), the Research Data Alliance (RDA), and past participation in the European FAIR-IMPACT project. The team also contributes to standardization work within the International Astronomical Union (IAU) for atomic and molecular data in astrophysics.
F-VAMDC is a leading infrastructure for the scientific community : it has more than 15,000 requests per year and a significant bibliographic impact (500 external publications, 125 F-VAMDC publications, and 100 publications by the international consortium - https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.14811025).
Recent developments include the Python pyVAMDC library. Launched in 2024, pyVAMDC directly meets the user needs and simplifies makes access to atomic and molecular data ever simpler, while ensuring the sustainability and data provenance and citation according to FAIR principles.
