Obsphere Announcement

[gfish]

http://www.obsphere.com

I am pleased to finally announce Obsphere, a tool for sharing and exploring geographic data. There is a lot of geo-coded data floating around, but it's hard to find and you often need specialist tools to explore it. No longer! Obsphere lets everyone upload data, so it can all be explored through a single interface. Import tools are provided for Shapefiles, KML, GeoTIFF and CSV. There is also an editor for entering shapes and data manually.

Finding layers is easy with the browsing tools. Simply move around in the map and the list of visible layers will update as you do so. Search tools are also provided to help you find exactly what you're looking for. Obsphere isn't just limited to the spatial dimensions, however. All layers are also tagged with their temporal validity -- specifying when as well as where they exist. The timeline defaults to all of recorded human history -- the last 10,000 years -- but you can zoom in if you want to narrow your results.

I've been working on this for about 11 months now, and I'm pretty pleased with the result. If you think the system is interesting, I'd appreciate it if you passed the link along. This kind of thing is only useful if lots of people are using it.

Comments

[dymaxion.livejournal.com]

Neat! The only GISish stuff I'm doing right now is for balloon tracking, which is sort of a different use case -- we're use google earth as our display engine for that, but I'll keep this in mind if that changes.

[dymaxion.livejournal.com]

Although I can see this being a really neat tool for game world dev -- how hard would it be to load non-earth data and map sets.

[gfish.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I decided to ignore elevation issues for now. If I continue to work on this, I'll certainly be looking at that, as well as automated KML export tools.

As long as everything was described in standard lat/lon, there is no reason layers have to be referencing the real Earth. If you add Map Layers->None as the first layer, it will remove the background default Google Map tiles.

[dymaxion.livejournal.com]

Ok, that works -- no providing your own datum, but otherwise flexible. Very cool.

[bakeme.livejournal.com]

like topographical data? i tried to find a good topographical map of seattle recently to see where i wanted to live if antarctica melted, and was seriously frustrated. i found a chintzy table somewhere with elevations for different elementary schools around town. eye roll.

is that the kind of thing you're talking about?

[gfish.livejournal.com]

You can find topos encoded as GeoTIFFs, which could be loaded. That would work pretty well.

I haven't added support for mesh surfaces yet, which would be the real way to do it. Importing the data wouldn't be too hard, but there would be some fairly major interface issues I need to work out first to make it useful. Rendering a 3d surface in Google Maps isn't really going to work, so I need to define what analysis tools would be needed. Drawing contours at specific elevations is one of them, and that is really what you'd want for checking where the coastline will be in 50 years.

[sistawendy.livejournal.com]

Nifty! I'll check it out more thoroughly in a time & place that has less broken connectivity. I'm interested in topo maps, too.

[chatworthy.livejournal.com]

Shiny map toy! Congratulations and much success!