ECHO Clearinghouse
Encyclopedia
ECHO Clearinghouse refers to a system used by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) to spatially, temporally and otherwise index the petabytes of data that NASA's Earth Science projects collect. It does not hold the data itself, but serves as a search engine that other applications can access via a web service based interface. While ECHO has been set up to support both data and services, as of mid 2008, data is well represented and services are yet to be focused on.
technologies would facilitate a democratization of the access to data. NASA began the ECHO effort as a prototype, using web technology to allow the public extensive access to data previously only available to researchers. Access was initially through an application programming interface
, not a graphical user interface
.
The system was originally specified by a multi-contractor and government committee. The contractor Global Science and Technology led software development from 1999 until 2007. Following that, the work moved to the NASA EOSDIS
contractor. Blueprint Technologies (later Vangent) also contributed to the process.
History
In the late 1990s, NASA recognized that the emerging internetInternet
The Internet is a global system of interconnected computer networks that use the standard Internet protocol suite to serve billions of users worldwide...
technologies would facilitate a democratization of the access to data. NASA began the ECHO effort as a prototype, using web technology to allow the public extensive access to data previously only available to researchers. Access was initially through an application programming interface
Application programming interface
An application programming interface is a source code based specification intended to be used as an interface by software components to communicate with each other...
, not a graphical user interface
Graphical user interface
In computing, a graphical user interface is a type of user interface that allows users to interact with electronic devices with images rather than text commands. GUIs can be used in computers, hand-held devices such as MP3 players, portable media players or gaming devices, household appliances and...
.
The system was originally specified by a multi-contractor and government committee. The contractor Global Science and Technology led software development from 1999 until 2007. Following that, the work moved to the NASA EOSDIS
EOSDIS
The is a key core capability in NASA’s Earth Science Data Systems Program. It provides end-to-end capabilities for managing NASA’s Earth science data from various sources – satellites, aircraft, field measurements, and various other programs...
contractor. Blueprint Technologies (later Vangent) also contributed to the process.