EOS data finder: A comprehensive web-based earth science data portal

The paper presents a comprehensive Web-based earth science data portal. It interoperates with an OpenGIS Catalogue Service for Web (CSW) wrapper for the NASA EOSDIS ClearingHOuse (ECHO) system to fulfill metadata queries, data orders and data customization from NASA's Earth observing data holdings. It features a Google map based preview of the area of interest to enable multi-scale global browsing, provides a userfriendly asynchronous query and response mechanism, and implements a public OpenGIS CSW protocol to improve the system's interoperability. The system design strategies, system architecture, and component view are described.