The Earth Observing System (EOS) Clearinghouse, or ECHO refers to a system that was used by the
National Aeronautics and Space Administration
The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA ) is an independent agency of the US federal government responsible for the civil space program, aeronautics research, and space research.
NASA was established in 1958, succeeding th ...
(NASA) to spatially, temporally and otherwise index the
petabytes
The byte is a unit of digital information that most commonly consists of eight bits. Historically, the byte was the number of bits used to encode a single character of text in a computer and for this reason it is the smallest addressable unit ...
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.
History
In the late 1990s, NASA recognized that the emerging
internet 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
An application programming interface (API) is a way for two or more computer programs to communicate with each other. It is a type of software interface, offering a service to other pieces of software. A document or standard that describes how t ...
, not a
graphical user interface.
Retirement
In 2017, th
Common Metadata Repository (CMR)replaced ECHO as a high-performance, high-quality, continuously evolving metadata system that catalogs all data and service metadata records for NASA's EOSDIS. CMR will be the authoritative management system for all EOSDIS metadata.
[{{Cite web , last=Earth Science Data Systems , first=NASA , date=2019-06-05 , title=Common Metadata Repository (CMR) {{! Earthdata , url=https://www.earthdata.nasa.gov/eosdis/science-system-description/eosdis-components/cmr , access-date=2024-02-03 , website=www.earthdata.nasa.gov , language=en]
References
External links
Official CMR website
NASA online