  Planetary sciences can benefit from several different sources of information,
i.e. ground-based or near Earth-based observations, space missions and
laboratory experiments. The data collected from these sources, however, are
spread over a number of smaller, separate communities and stored through
different facilities: this makes it difficult to integrate them. The IDIS
initiative, born in the context of the Europlanet project, performed a pilot
study of the viability and the issues to be overcome in order to create an
integrated search system for planetary data. As part of the results of such
pilot study, the IDIS Small Bodies and Dust node developed a search system
based on a preliminary XML data model. Here we introduce the goals of the IDIS
initiative and describe the structure and the working of this search system.
The source code of the search system is released under GPL license to allow
people interested in participating to the IDIS initiative both as developers
and as data providers to familiarise with the search environment and to allow
the creation of volunteer nodes to be integrated into the existing network.
