Traditionally, scientists have captured data on the history of Earth processes in the printed literature where the data sets, by the nature of the medium, are incomplete. The answer to this "information bottleneck" is geoinformatics, a revolution that is migrating information to more readily retrievable electronic formats. The Chronos system is a community facility that addresses the geoinformatics needs of sedimentary geology and paleobiology, emphasizes global correlation and time series analysis, and directly supports cutting edge research on topics that include the evolution and diversity of life, climate change, geochemical cycles, and many other aspects of the Earth system. The Chronos system provides simultaneous and seamless integration of hosted and federated databases with analytical and visualization tools. Chronos exploits software advances for translating between different data structures and terminologies to achieve interoperability within a distributed data management system.