CEOS CINTEX Federation Help Desk

Welcome to the CEOS CINTEX Federation Help Desk website. Take a look at What's New.

According to the Federation Help Desk Charter this Help Desk is designed to:

1. Coordinate CEOS Agency help desks.
2. List recommended CINTEX help desk services.
3. Provide support to CINTEX sites for establishing a help desk.
4. Provide contact information and a referral service for individual help desks.
5. Act as a coordination center for outreach and system promotion activities.

The information to be found on this website is:

Home - This page.
Members - information on members, including member Help Desk contact information.
Policies - suggested policies (e.g. Data center referral policy).
Help Desk Services - information on organizing and operating a Help Desk.
Example Messages - samples of messages and responses to messages.
Links - links to related sites.

The Committee on Earth Observation Satellites (CEOS) was established to optimize the benefits of space-borne Earth observations through cooperation of its members in mission planning and in the development of compatible data products, formats, services, applications, and policies.

The CEOS Inventory Interoperability Extension (CINTEX) was established in 1995 as an element of the CEOS Access Subgroup, whose focus is to enable Earth Observation data and information services to be more accessible and usable to data providers and data users world-wide.

CINTEX established an international test bed capability for catalog interoperability techniques and protocols which evolved into an operational system with an established user community. CINTEX currently uses NASA IMS V0 servers located in Australia (2 sites), Canada, France, Germany (2 sites), Italy (2 sites), Japan, Russia and the US (9 sites). The CINTEX Web Gateway (http://eos.nasa.gov/imswelcome) provides a consistent view of data sets held at all participating data centers, allowing users to search science data holdings, retrieve summary and detailed descriptions of the data inventory, view browse images, and place orders for data products.

CINTEX designed the Catalog Interoperability Protocol (CIP) to provide interoperability between the different catalog systems of agencies in the Earth observation community. CIP software is currently being developed and the first test site was recently made available to the public (http://www.infeo.org). When operational, CIP is expected to greatly increase the data holdings and number of agencies whose data catalogs are interoperable.

Information contained in these pages are intended as guidelines only. Please submit your comments and recommendations to Ben Burford.