  The start of operation of several large-aperture telescopes has motivated
several groups around the world to conduct deep large imaging surveys,
complementing other wide-area but shallower surveys. A special class of imaging
surveys are the public ones such as those being conducted by the ESO Imaging
Survey (EIS) project established with the primary objective of providing to the
ESO community large datasets from which samples can be drawn for VLT programs.
To date several surveys have been carried out providing multi-passband optical
data over relatively large areas to moderate depth, deep optical/infrared
surveys of smaller fields as well as observations of a large number of selected
stellar fields. These surveys have produced a large amount of well-defined
datasets with known limits from which a variety of data products have been
extracted and distributed. The goal of the present contribution is to give an
overview of the EIS project, to present the end-to-end survey system being
developed by this program and to highlight the effort being made to standardize
procedures, to build software tools to assess the quality of the derived
products and to explore the available datasets in a systematic and consistent
way to search for astronomical objects of potential scientific interest.
