The Gaia Science Alerts project (GSA) aims to augment a precision survey of the Milky Way with a controlled, precision survey of all classes of transient phenomena. While onboard BP/RP spectra from Gaia will ultimately allow us to classify many Gaia Alerts based on Gaia data alone, in the initial phases of the GSA project it is necessary to verify and classify discoveries with ground-based spectroscopic followup. In this article, we describe a subset of the ongoing Gaia Alerts followup programmes, and some of the initial science results from this work.

The Virtual Atomic and Molecular Data Centre (VAMDC, http://www.vamdc.eu) is an international Consortium that has created an interoperable e-science infrastructure for the exchange of atomic and molecular data. The VAMDC defines standards for the exchange of atomic and molecular data, develop reference implementation of those standards, deploys registries of internet resources (yellow pages), designs user applications in order to meet the user needs, builds data access layers above databases to provide unified outputs from these databases, cares about asynchronous queries with workflows and connects its infrastructure to the grid. The paper describes the current service deployment of the VAMDC data infrastructure across our registered databases and the key features of the current infrastructure.