PDM attended the launch of Tobin’s new Global Planner worldwide cartographic software in Houston this month. Tom Murdoch, geospatial solutions director claims that international workers are often frustrated by the lack of quality topographic maps outside of Europe or North America. Tobin’s solution has been to provide consistent, reliable world-wide map coverage.
Russian
The entry level global planner provides worldwide coverage from 1:500,000 Russian military maps. An English language layer is added (allowing instant drill down to a place name), along with vector information from the Digital Chart of the World (DCW) in ESRI Shape file format. A further layer adds the Gtopo 30 Digital Elevation Model (1 km US data). GP is bundled with Tobin’s DOMs View 2000 GIS browser and editing system. DOMs View, based on ESRI’s Map Objects technology, allows a credible basemap to be generated by zooming and panning to an area of interest. ESRI symbology (for wells, pipes etc.) can be added to the maps in DOMs View, as can text - which can be bent along geographic objects.
Country Planner
Global Planner is the first in a series of products that Tobin is developing. Next in line will be the Country Planner - which will be based on the Russian 1:200,000 series maps ands will include Landsat ETM+ (7 channel satellite imagery).
Warfare
Tobin claim the Russian basemaps to be superior to the US equivalent. Both were established with warfare in mind, but the US maps were designed for air combat, while the Russian maps were made to support land-based warfare and are much more detailed. For the ultimate in resolution, (if you are planning an invasion), Tobin has access 1:50,000 scale maps. On demand, these can be digitized at Tobin’s Moscow facility to produce very high detail to order. GP will be available by year end 2000. The 3000 raster maps are compressed with technology from MrSID and will be supplied on some 35 CD-ROMs.