Abstract:
Despite the fact that humanity as a whole has never been wealthier, we are facing many problems; some, such as global environmental and breadbasket issues, are in fact age-old problems, but have gained unprecedented recognition recently, while others, such as local revitalization, conservation of culture and similar are receiving attention on a less global scale. One thing that is common to almost
... all of these problems, however, from our individual day-to-day difficulties all the way up to the world-spanning global scale, is that they somehow involve geographical factors. This is not surprising at all when we think about the obvious fact that we humans all live in space.
Yet, many people tend to think "whatever happens in faraway countries has nothing to do with me," whereas they fail to appreciate their own culture. This way of thinking can be considered a negative geographical effect, and it is one of the factors that make it difficult to solve various issues occurring on the Earth.
For instance, how do the breadbasket issues in Africa relate to our daily lives? or what roles does our culture play in the local community? In the GLOBALBASE project, we believe that one of the keys to asking and answering such questions lie in easy access to geographical information, in particular through visual representation of this information using iconography in a so-called geo-browser. The purpose of the GLOBALBASE project is to show various issues occurring on the Earth utilizing geo-browser and related technologies and to heighten the awareness among the public about local and global issues.
Some of the well-known software already in use today for browsing up-to-date geographical information include Google Earth, Earth Browser, and NASA's browser. What the GLOBALBASE project aims to do is creating browser that appears superficially similar.
We must, however, not forget that current geo-browsers present a pitfall. The majority of the geographical information is maintained at a large scale, such as aerial photographs and official maps, and may not be created or updated by any one person and/or country. In normal geo-browsers, geographical information used as the base is provided by browser developers and related enterprises. Thus, it is not a far-fetched thought that some powerful organizations might construct geographical information that is particularly convenient for them. Or, to put it the other way round, not all the geographical information available actually reflects information of local communities and/or global issues.
Then, the question becomes: what geo-browser is able to reflect information of local communities and global issues as is? We consider such a geo-browser to be one that allows local communities or people/organizations, who are perhaps conscious about issues involving themselves, to provide information on their own accord. Such voluntarily provided information of course varies greatly depending on the provider, even if it deals with the same subject, and information provided by one source may contradict with information provided by another. At GLOBALBASE, we embrace this concept; we actually believe it to be very important that huge amounts of such potentially contradictory information can be provided, even when it covers the same space.
When one considers how a geo-browser should be designed given this premise, the first issue that should be considered is the basic data structure. In GLOBALBASE, we do not prescribe any base map. All pieces of open geographical information are equal, and any of them can be used as a basis. Correspondingly, the viewer side should be able to select his/her preferred basis and change it according to the circumstances as well. Moreover, information providers should be able to determine all parameters of each piece of geographical information. Furthermore, it should be possible to store such geographical information on a server under complete control using administrator's privileges.
On the other hand, the viewers of the information, i.e., the geo-browser users, should be able to select geographical information based on keywords and classification information in order to quickly and easily obtain exactly the information they need and show the selected geographical information in one space in a seamless manner.
These conditions proposed for the GLOBALBASE project are to some extent already the norm for normal information on the Internet, considering how information providers are able to publish WWW documents and users are able to browse them; but this is not the case in network-oriented geographical information systems. This is where the GLOBALBASE project aims to make difference using our up-to-date autonomous-distribution technology. 
Links
