The Integrated Ocean Drilling Program (IODP) is developing a web based information service SEDIS - to facilitate access to all data and information related to scientific ocean drilling, regardless of origin or location of data. SEDIS will be designed to integrate distributed scientific drilling data via metadata. The three main data contributors to SEDIS currently are the IODP implementing organizations (IOs) from the United States (USIO), Japan (CDEX) and Europe with Canada (ESO). Each IO uses its own drilling platform and data management system. Initially SEDIS will integrate the data search of the IO databases by harvesting distributed metadata without the necessity to centralize the data storage. SEDIS could be expanded at a later stage to include other scientific drilling data from continental or lake drilling. In future development, SEDIS will also include a publication search engine and advanced data search, visualization and mapping tools.