European Space Information System

The European Space Information System (ESIS) project was launched in 1988 as a service for homogeneous access to the heterogeneous databases in the network. At the time, DECnet, EARN, and Bitnet were the main academic links. The project preceded the World Wide Web , which then strongly advanced the technology of homogeneous access from 1993 onwards.

Originally, ESIS was intended to connect the databases of the European Space Agency with the "centers of excellence". These were the Center de Données astronomiques de Strasbourg and its SIMBAD service, the European Southern Observatory , the Canadian Astronomical Data Center (CADC) and the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory for Space Physics data.

ESIS 'greatest success was the transfer of its catalog browser to the CDS, which later became better known as the VizieR Catalog Service.

See also

• ESA

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• SG Ansari, P. Donzelli, E. Simonsen, F. Ochsenbein: Transfer of ESIS to scientific institutes. In: ESA Bull. No. 86, 1996, pp. 43-46.
• P. Giommi, SG Ansari, P. Donzelli, A. Micol: The European Space Information System (ESIS). In: Experimental Astronomy. Vol. 6, No. 1-2, 1995.