European Space Information System

The project European Space Information System ( ESIS ) was launched as a service for homogeneous access to heterogeneous databases on the network in 1988. At that time, DECnet, EARN and BITNET, the most important academic links. The project was preceded by the World Wide Web, which was then the technology of homogeneous access from 1993 forward drive strong.

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

The greatest success of ESIS was the transfer of its catalog browser on the CDS, which was better known later as Vizier Catalogue Service.