ESIS 1 holds information on a broad range of commercial and publicly funded Information Society application projects in Europe. It aims at providing a tool for benchmarking, knowledge, communication, partnership and the promotion of best practice examples. Furthermore, it could serve as a navigation tool for all key actors and help in the promotion of the Information Society in Europe.

More precisely, ESIS 1 combines four categories of information:

• An inventory of projects, which is the core of ESIS. Projects must use ICT in an innovative, interactive way and provide remote access. They may concern a large number of social and economic sectors and be initiated by national, regional, public and private organisations, or through partnerships set up between public and private groups. This inventory is conducted on the basis of a standardised questionnaire to be filled in by project promoters. This will permit national and European qualitative and quantitative analysis based on standardised data and statistics.
• The monitoring and regular analysis of new regulations and a collection of basic facts on Information Society developments.
• A permanent overview of public and private promotional actions and initiatives aimed at favoring the development of the Information Society.
• The mapping of the actors, notably the public or private network facilities offering Information Society infrastructure, services and applications (e.g. gas, railways, water supply, cable TV, highways, electric networks etc.).

The European Commission has made general findings and statistical results openly available to all parties with a strong interest in the development and progress of Information Society initiatives, including :

• Various European Commission directorates, units and services
• Industry and social partners in Member States
• Individual organisations and research bodies
• The general public

The ESIS team: the ESIS project has been conducted in a decentralised manner. In each Member State, a contractor has been selected to perform the work. The centralisation of the information and the co-ordination is carried out by ISPO which is supported by an external project management team, in charge of the data synthesis and the database management.

In 1999, ESIS has been extended to CEEC and Mediterranean countries, under the name ESIS 2. ESIS 2 started in March 1999 and will last until 2001. 

The original ESIS project covered the EU Member States for the period 1997-1999; the last reports were published in January 1999. Because they offer comprehensive information on European developments of the Information Society, the reports are still available for consultation in this section, and access is provided via the ESIS search engine.

An update campaign, funded by the PROMISE programme, is in progress as far as IS projects included in the database are concerned; 

Two new report are now available:

• a report on public IS strategies in the EU Member States (October 2000)
• a report on Information Society indicators in the EU (November 2000).