PANGAEA is an information system for processing, long-term storage, and publication of georeferenced data related to earth science fields. Essential services supplied by PANGAEA are project data management and the distribution of visualization and analysis software. Organization of data management includes quality control and publication of data and the dissemination of metadata according to international standards. Data managers are responsible for acquisition and maintenance of data. The data model used reflect the information processing steps in the earth science fields and can handle any related analytical data. The basic technical structure corresponds to a three tiered client/server architecture with a number of comprehensive clients and middleware components controlling the information flow and quality. On the server side a relational database management system (RDBMS) is used for information storage. The web-based clients include a simple search engine (Panga Vista) and a data mining tool (ART). The client used for maintenance of information contents is optimized for data management purposes. Analysis and visualization of metainformation and analytical data is supported by a number of software tools, which can either be used as 'plug-ins' of the PANGAEA clients or as standalone applications, distributed as freeware from the PANGAEA website. Established and well-documented software tools are the mini-GIS PanMap, the plotting tool PanPlot, and Ocean Data View (ODV) for the exploration of oceanographic data. PANGAEA operates on a long-term basis. The available resources are sufficient not only for the acquisition of new data and the maintenance of the system but also for further technical and organizational developments. © 2002 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.