INFEO and CIP

The CEO Programme is a European Community funded programme for advancing the use of Earth Observation (EO) data. As part of this programme CEO is developing INFEO, an interoperable catalogue system that allows simultaneous searching of major EO data collections distributed all over the world. INFEO is based on CIP (Catalogue Interoperability Protocol), which is an application profile of the existing search and retrieval protocol 239.50 aimed specifically at EO datasets. CIP was designed by CEOS, whose members-all the world´s civil agencies involved in EO satellite programmes-will use it to give access to their catalogues. An advantage of CIP is that it covers all catalogue services like Search, Browse, Retrieve, and Order, which allows the use of one tool to get or give access to all services. Furthermore, CIP supports catalogue specifics so that all catalogue information can be made available, and CIP has self-describing metadata, which helps to keep information up-to-date. Last but not least CIP has collections, a mechanism to organise data in a hierarchical structure. Through collections the data can be viewed in themes, which makes finding suitable data products both easier and more efficient