Around The World In Eighty Clicks
A Review of Cartopedia: The Ultimate World Reference Atlas
Steve Smith
Atlases, Gazetteers, encyclopedias and such are the mainstay of middle-school students who are hot on the trail of geographical data, usually for the purpose of quasi-plagiarization in school reports. Dorling-Kindersley's Cartopedia, which mistitles itself the "Ultimate World Reference Atlas," really amounts to a more convenient but no less wooden and unimaginative collection of such swipable data. It is workmanlike, more comprehensive than detailed, and wholly unwilling to encourage you or your child to think about the world and its people in anything but the most familiar ways.
Cartopedia's opening menu promises five distinct ways of looking at our
planet, though it delivers considerably less. The Political World brings up
an earth map that is divided along traditional nation-state boundaries. A
click on any country brings up its more detailed local map where you can zoom
in even closer to specific regions and view numerous profiles of the
country's life. The Physical World view would have been an excellent
opportunity to offer a truly innovative view of the planet from the
standpoint of its ecological resources rather than its formal political
divisions. Alas, this segment of the Disk is a misnomer and a true
disappointment, as it just gets you to the same information as the Political
View but through a borderless map of the world's geographical features.
A
globe icon zips you into the World in View section, a bit of multimedia
fluff, in which the user can collect in a gallery any of the numerous photos
and videos that are available in the other views. Two other segments off of
the main menu simply allow access to the database via an alphabetical listing
of nation's as well as a more robust index of all of the place names,
including cities, on the disk.
Cartopedia's interface is a simple and considerate design, icon-intensive
and almost exclusively visual. Clicking on most maps brings up detailed
visual and informational views. All icons are clearly tagged at all times. An
ever-present globe spins in the corner of most detailed views, and you can
command it to enlarge into the center of the screen and locate where you are
on the global scale.
Especially welcome is having the main menu for the
program available in miniature at every point in the program, allowing you to
jump to all areas of the program without backtracking through previous menus.
There is a back-up button that scrolls sequentially through previously viewed
screens, but a History device would have been even more helpful. For all of
the iconic selections, however, Cartopedia's screen never seems overwhelmed
with choices, a true sign of intelligent interface design. Oh that the real
guts of the program showed such thoughtfulness.
The informational content of Cartopedia seems to be pitched mainly to
school-aged report writers and perhaps older browsers of perfunctory data.
Like the common atlas or encyclopedia, every nation's page offers
categorized profiles, in this case eighteen, on a convenient menu. Each is a
lengthy paragraph that covers the usual material in a gazetteer of this sort:
education, politics, general history, foreign aid, crime rates, etc. Of
course, all of the textual information is available for printing. As is the
case throughout Cartopedia, depth is the main limitation. There is little to
no information regarding individual cities, geographical formations, or
anything beyond general national views. Each nation has one or more photos of
main sites or general life.
The sparse videos on this disk are just a bit
more than gratuitous, as they depict many of the natural phenomena within an
area, volcanos in Hawaii and such. One very helpful innovation is the ability
to compare any of the quantifiable information and charts of one nation with
that of another. Otherwise, the capabilities of the computer are devoted to
convenience items. Legends and mileage scales can be popped up atop the map,
which makes map reading less arduous. The opportunity to hot-link data,
provide deeper informational profiles, or make the maps themselves more
detailed and informative have been ignored here.
What we have in Cartopedia is a high-priced disk-based world atlas that is functional but fails to exploit the depth or flexibility of information that the CD-Rom invites.
School House Scorecard
| Product: |
Cartopedia: The Ultimate World Reference Atlas |
| Company: |
Dorling-Kindersley Multimedia
|
| Cost: |
$39.95 |
System Requirements:
PC, 386DX/33 and above, 4Megs, SVGA,
CD, 3Megs HD space, mouse and Windows 3.1 or above.
Breakdown:
Ease of Use 4
Learning Value 3
Entertainment Value 1
Graphics 2
Sound 2
Overall Score:
Copyright © 1997 InfoMedia, Inc. All rights reserved worldwide.