The software suite was originally written by the Center for Networked Information Discovery and Retrieval (CNIDR) located in Research Triangle Park, NC with National Science Foundation funding. A/WWW Enterprises now maintains the open source software for public usage, supported by paying government clients, such as the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, NASA, and the FGDC who have provided support to enhance the functionality and reliability of the software. This software suite represents a reference implementation of catalog service software.
The Isearch module of the Isite software has been extended to support a variety of date/time formats and supports coordinates as real numbers for search in collections of tens to hundreds of thousands of documents. Isearch is also capable of indexing many special documents (via "doctypes") to parse and make serachable certain fields or structures of information. These include FGDC Metadata, NASA DIF, ANZLIC metadata, ISO 19115 metadata (soon 19139), with many other non-geospatial resource types available.
To use Isite in Clearinghouse you will need to download the latest version of the Isite software, configure the software with the location of the documents on your site, index the documents, and activate the server process on a TCP/IP port so it can be queried from the Net and harvested from portals like geodata.gov. The process flow diagram or frames will walk you through these steps.