The Consortium for International Earth Science Information Network is proud to announce the availability of CIESIN's Gateway. CIESIN's Gateway is a state-of-the-art distributed information system providing users with an intuitive interface facilitating integrated data and information searching, viewing, browsing, and ordering. As a system which employs parallel searching of heterogeneous databases, CIESIN's Gateway totally transforms the ways in which researchers can interact with massive amounts of data stored in different formats at distant locations via modem or a network connection. Other systems only allow for the sequential exploration of data and consume days and even months of research time to locate what CIESIN's Gateway can locate in seconds. Currently, CIESIN's Gateway makes it possible to search for and retrieve data and metadata (data about data) available from CIESIN's archives, NASA's EOSDIS and Global Change Master Directory (GCMD), CIESIN-developed information resources from the U.S. EPA and USDA, and CIESIN's Information Cooperative partners.
CIESIN's Gateway clients for MS-Windows, Sun-OS, and a character based interface are currently available for beta testing. Versions for other versions of UNIX and a Macintosh client are in development.
For more information on CIESIN's Gateway, including access to client software and documentation, use the URL: http://www.ciesin.org/gateway/gw-home.html
For more information on CIESIN, browse the CIESIN Home Page: http://www.ciesin.org
CIESIN User Services can be contacted on-line at ciesin.info@ciesin.org, or by phone at (517) 797-2727, 9-5 pm EST.
--Christopher Davis