GLOBALBASE is a completely autonomous distributed GIS. Our ultimate goal is for geographical information created and made available by individual users in GLOBALBASE to grow unbounded in volume, interlinked with each other, eventually forming a mirror image of the Earth itself (like a parallel world).

Most Web-based geographical information systems employ a mechanism where the base maps are maintained on their own servers, protected from outside interference. GLOBALBASE is special in that it allows geographical information of any form, including base maps, to be coordinated with information on other servers by overlapping or connecting. Not only may information providers combine and upload geographical information at their own will, but the viewer side may also pick and choose any combination of geographical information he/she wishes to be displayed in his/her browser.

The aim of this project is to develop and implement the new technologies required to build such an open and free geographical information society.

GLOBALBASE is like the "Web of maps." You might have heard the term "Web-GIS." At first glance, GLOBALBASE is similar to a Web-GIS, but the underlying concept is very different. The "Web of maps" is a network (Web) where an infinite number of "maps" are linked together based on mutual positional relationships and mutually associated. Using this mechanism, "maps" provided by an infinite number of people and organizations can be connected with each other autonomously, which can be viewed as a kind of mirror Earth in cyberspace.

The relationship between GLOBALBASE and maps is exactly the same as the relationship between WWW and documents. Documents uploaded to the WWW link to each other via hypertext links and can in principle be thought of as a single text spreading all over the Earth.

Web-GISs are different in this respect. For instance, as you may know, it is not possible to overlap or connect maps in e.g. GoogleMaps or Mapion at the same level. Maps in Web-GISs are, in a way, like illustrations of a document. Conceptually, it is the document that is hyperlinked, not the illustrations (although this may not necessarily be the case on the implementation level).

Now, let's take a look at our architecture, in which maps are properly hyperlinked both on the conceptual and the implementation level. The following images show views of the world as presented in COSMOS, the dedicated browser of GLOBALBASE.