Obsphere: Plotting to Share The World
Software Review: Obsphere
by Christine Bush
For EarthSatelliteMaps.com
Ratings:
Concept ****
Design **
Functionality **
Value **
Potential ****
This week Obsphere has released its web-based collaborative mapping application to the public. Built upon the Google Earth API, Obsphere invites cartographers to upload and share your own layers from several popular file formats: .kml, GeoTiff, shape files or geocoordinates from a comma-separated values file.
Obsphere also allows you to explore maps through time. This is accomplished by having layers tagged with “temporal validity”. You’ll want to spend some time reading the Help page in order to avoid becoming confused and possibly frustrated. This seems to be an alpha release with sluggish performance and IE on Windows seems to best provide an experience approximating the one described by the press release.
Layers available to early-adopters are fairly North American centric tagged for current “temporal validity”. You will find some Census data, roads, US aquifers, railroads and Canadian provinces, for example. But if you set your timeline back a bit you can see polygons indicating the Aztec Empire or World Countries for a variety of dates. You can also use some Astronomy-based layers to see the Terminus for selected dates. Timeline based viewing is facilitated by using a set of slide bars under the map viewer and then updating the map’s “plot”. This is an ambitious though welcome feature for those of us who love history maps.
The viewer window feels a bit cramped to me, requiring a lot more panning and zooming than seems necessary. I also found it unwieldy to use the timeline features, having to discover how the plot updating and display labels work. There doesn’t appear to be a straight forward manner to search for a given country in a given year. GUI elements come and go. And if you’re exploring Obsphere in browsers other than IE, you can create anachronistic maps quite easily but I doubt this is a desired feature.
I plan further exploration using Obsphere and will write soon about my layer creation and upload experiences. For now, I encourage you to check out this promising Google Earth based web application with the caveat that “there be dragons here”.
You can visit Obsphere online at http://www.obsphere.com.
