The European Space Information System is currently being transferred to several scientific institutions around Europe. One of the major goals of the project is to achieve a high level of integrity, whereby several sites will provide services in a uniform way by using today's World-Wide Web technology.
ESRIN and the CDS are setting up the ESIS Catalogue Browser on the premises of the Observatoire de Strasbourg, where the current ESIS functionnalities will be integrated within the existing CDS services (see Egret and Ochsenbein, in these proceedings). Potentially, over 600 catalogues and mission logs could be made accessible through the World-Wide Web. The catalogue browser will also support links to other archives, such as the ESO-ECF and CADC archives.
Other ESIS scientific packages currently allow the retrieval, visualisation and manipulation of images, spectra and light curves, including searches on the Catalogue Browser. These scientific packages, that use the hypertext transfer protocol, like any other WWW client, will also be transferred to the European Southern Observatory, the Brera Observatory in Milan, Italy, the Istituto di Astrofisica Spaziale in Frascati, Italy and the Monteporzio Observatory, Italy.
As a result of this activity, data retrieval will become more manageable and extensive to the benefit of the whole astronomical community.
The operational phase of ESIS at the CDS will begin in early 1996.