Problems with expressing time

The instant deletion of the Google earth Plugin this week means that I am having to port a very large archaeological dataset comprising a digital atlas covering thousands of hectares of archaeological air photographic, geophysical and other data (the largest project of its kind in the world) into an alternative environment.

Cesium seems the only place to go at present.

I am using the sandbox application to try and test various aspects of the dataset

In the Google Earth plugin I used the time <begin> and <end> variables to be able to animate the features, displayed in vector overlays, through time. in order to handle the prehistoric phases I used negative time, -2500 to -1800 for instance to represent 2500BC to 1800BC. This does not work.

does anyone know if there a way to express negative time?

The vector cover overlays a vast array of tiled raster data which when loaded simply crashes firefox before I can see any error reports.

Loading a sample of the tiled raster data seems only to show the lowest resolution tiles and does not react to zooming in with a refresh to show the high resolution tiles

The digital atlas managed the results of more than 30 years of landscape research and whilst the data remains intact the Atlas was a primary research interface and I am seriously unimpressed with the way google has simply turned off the resource, a large part of the subject of my Google talk last spring.

Dominic Powlesland

Hi Dominic,

That sounds like a really interesting project! Keep us posted on your progress. I’d love to see the finished results!

Our time system does handle prehistoric dates. JulianDate ‘dayNumber: 0’ is January 1st, 4713BC, so you can either set the number of days since then or use one of the helper functions like JulianDate.fromIso8601

For your tiled data, I’d have to see how you’re adding it to the globe to know why the higher resolution tiles aren’t popping in. If it was done with super overlays, that is not something we currently have support for. However, you might be able to use one of our tile providers like the UrlTemplateImageryProvider to load in the raster tiles instead. You can learn about the other imagery providers we support here: http://cesiumjs.org/tutorials/Imagery-Layers-Tutorial/

Let me know if you have any other questions.

Best,

Hannah