Open Sciences on Exoplanets – OpenExoplanets

The Encyclopedia of Exoplanets accessible via exoplanet.eu is the world-leading (most-used) database referencing all known exoplanets to date (be they confirmed or just candidates). It has been created in 1995 by our team when the first exoplanets came to view.
This ANR Flash proposal aims to kick-start the deployment of a new structure to our database. Indeed, since 1995, many progresses have been made and we now have much more information about planetary systems and are not only limited to planets. For instance, we know about many planetary atmospheres, we know of discs surrounding the planet-host stars, of exocomets passing in close orbit to the host star, of exomoons (similar to Saturn’s moons), of rings surrounding planets. Our present database cannot handle all of that diversity and cannot provide a planetary system perspective (rather than that of a planet focused), which would be very much needed now to get all information about a system at once and try to pinpoint planets that are more likely to host life.
We would like to strengthen temporary our technical team to put that new structure in place and make our database more open-science like with more interoperability across the different platforms. For this we suggest to develop a unique planetary data model that would be used by all researchers in exoplanet sciences to have a common ground when sharing data or publishing new planets. As part of this project, we also suggest to give exoplanets and all the planetary system components (be it the star, a satellite, a ring, an exocomet, …) a unique identifier that could be used across the literature to avoid the current problem that several systems have different names but are actually the same, which would ease cross-matching between different databases as well.
We also include in this proposal projects that would be useful to extend our reach to a larger community via developing our website in many more languages but also develop tools that are easy-to-use for students or teachers that would like to use our exoplanet database for pedagogical purposes. We indeed aim to target both the astrophysicists working on exoplanets and connected subjects (planetary sciences, exobiology…), but also teachers, students and people interested by recent and high-level knowledge about exoplanetology.
The overall goal of this project is to make the scientific knowledge about exoplanetary systems easily accessible and provide tools to comprehend the increasing complexity of the data that we now obtain. More precisely, this will come as a mix of new developments with our more versatile structure for the database to quickly follow every new discoveries, define a standard for planetary systems (data model) to allow common sharing of datasets, interconnections of many related databases (stars, planets, bibliography, instruments), develop tools to manipulate the exoplanet.eu data for research (allow observers to add their new data to our database, preparation of an observation campaign, comparison with theoretical models…), visualize and interpret datasets, give access to real data for pedagogical projects. This is the beginning of the OpenExoplanets programme.