Map Introduction Electronic Maps Links And References

Mapmaking dates back at least to the Stone Age and appears to predate written language by several millennia. On of the oldest surviving maps is painted on a wall of the Catal Huyuk settlement in south-central Anatolia (now Turkey); it dates from about 6200 BC . [ Harvey 2000, p. 142 ].

Early maps were vague and there was often controversy as to where to centre the map - one world map, for instance, has Jerusalem at the centre. The purpose of such maps seem to not be intended as geographic, but rather to show a history with regards to that geography. The early ship navigation charts were quite similar to modern maps in accuracy with the exception of unknown areas.

Many maps have a scale, determining how large objects on the map are in relation to their actual size. A larger scale shows more detail, thus requiring a larger map to show the same area. Some, though, are not drawn to scale - a famous example being the London Underground map.

If the map covers a large area of the surface of a globe, such as the Earth, it also has a projection, a way of translating the three-dimensional real surface of the geoid to a two-dimensional picture. One commonly used for navigation is the Mercator Projection; other popular projections are polar and a variety of equal-area projections.

The features shown on a map vary according to its purpose. For example, a roadThis page is related to transport you may be looking for the 2002 Bollywood movie Road''. A road is a strip of land, smoothed or otherwise prepared to allow easier travel, connecting two or more destinations. In the context of railways, a road is a single map may or may not show railroads, and if it does, it may show them less clearly than highwayA highway is a major road within a city, or linking several cities together. It includes roads known as interstate highway, freeway, motorway and autobahn, where a full description varies by country. Generally, a highway is a road which has multiple laness.

Maps can be political or geographical. The most important purpose of the political map is to show territorial borders; the purpose of the geographical is to show features of geographyGeography is the scientific study of the locational and spatial variation in both physical and human phenomena on Earth. The word derives from the Greek words g ("the Earth") and graphein ("to write," as in "to describe"). Geography is also the title of v such as mountains, soil type or land use. Geological maps show not only the physical surface, but characteristics of the underlying rock, faultHarrisburg, Pennsylvania. Such faults are common in the folded Appalachians. In geology, faults are discontinuities (cracks) in the Earth's crust that are the result of differential motion within the crust. Faults are the source of many earthquakes that a lines, and subsurface structures.

Many surveying projects have been carried out by the military. An example of this the BritishThe United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland is a state in Western Europe, usually known simply as the United Kingdom the UK Britain or less accurately as Great Britain . The UK was formed by a series of Acts of Union which united the formerly Ordnance SurveyShepshed in Leicestershire The Ordnance Survey (OS) is now a civilian organisation and government agency in the United Kingdom, and one of the world's largest producers of maps. In addition to producing a wide range of maps of Great Britain 1, the organis (which now is a civilian government agency).

Because maps are abstract representations of the world they are not neutral documents and must be carefully interpreted. It is, of course, this abstraction that makes them useful. Lewis Carroll made this point humorously in Sylvie and Bruno with his mention of a fictional map that had "the scale of a mile to the mile." A character notes some practical difficulties with this map and states that "we now use the country itself, as its own map, and I assure you it does nearly as well." This conceit is elaborated in a one-paragraph story by Jorge Luis Borges and Adolfo Bioy Casares, generally known in English as " On Exactitude in Science".

2 Electronic maps

For maps on a computer display, e.g. from the web or locally stored on CD-ROM or harddisk, zooming in means enlarging the scale, either by showing a smaller area in the same viewing window or by showing the same area in a larger viewing window, and one of the following:

replace the map by a more detailed one
enlarge the same map without enlarging the pixels, hence show more detail
enlarge the same map with the pixels enlarged (replaced by rectangles of pixels); no additional detail is shown, but, depending on the quality of one's vision, possibly more detail can be seen; if a computer display does not show adjacent pixels really separate, but overlapping instead (this does not apply for an LCD display, but may apply for a CRT), then replacing a pixel by a rectangle of pixels does show more detail.

Combinations are possible, e.g. the second applying for text and the third for the outline of a map feature such as a forest, a building etc. Also the map may have layers which are partly raster graphics and partly vector graphics.

For a single raster graphics image the second applies until the pixels in the image file correspond to the pixels of the display; on further zooming in, the third applies.

For a PDF-file typically the second applies. The increase in detail is, of course, limited to the information contained in the file: enlarging a curve it may eventually become a series of straight line segments, or other standard geometric figures such as arcs of circles.

A variation of the third possibility is that interpolation is performed.

Text is not necessarily enlarged when zooming in. Similarly, a road represented by a double line may or may not become wider when one zooms in. A variation of the first possibility above is that more text is displayed (such as more town names), but that for the rest of the image the second applies.

Web maps are typically handled by a Geographic information system which does the spatial data processing necessary to handle different coordinate system and spatial relations between different kinds of data. GIS does a lot more than make maps, though.

3 Links and references

3.1 References

David Buisseret, ed., Monarchs, Ministers and Maps: The Emergence of Cartography as a Tool of Government in Early Modern Europe. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992, [BooksEnthsiast.com]
Miles Harvey, The Island of Lost Maps: A True Story of Cartographic Crime. New York : Random House, 2000. [BooksEnthsiast.com, cited above; also BooksEnthsiast.com]
Mark Monmorier, How to Lie with Maps, [BooksEnthsiast.com]

3.2 See also

Atlas (cartography)
World map
Topographic map
Geologic map
List of mapping idiosyncrasies
Cartogram
Floorplan
Bradshaws, including maps of the British railway network, first published in 1839
- Linking Mapquest maps to articles.

3.3 External links

US Map: ABMap - Interactive World Map and detailed united states street map
World Maps
Multimap world atlas: on UK, US, Canada, Australia and Western Europe more detailed than the rest of the world
[1] - Microsoft/ Encarta/ Expedia world atlas, for North America and Europe to street level.
MapQuest: on US, Canada and Western Europe more detailed than the rest of the world
Yahoo Maps: on US, Canada, Germany, France, Spain, Italy
Yahoo Germany: on France, UK, Germany, Italy, Spain, Portugal, Austria, Switzerland, Benelux
Map South Pacific: on Polynesia, Melanesia, Micronesia
[2] - ESRI atlas of the US
National Atlas of the United States
Small country maps, conveniently linked from continent maps
UT scanned collection: by the University of Texas at Austin
Example of legend (Cito-Plan city maps)
http://www.geocities.com/marcoschmidt.geo/geo-data.html
USGS National Map
Maps category of PopulationData.net
Maps of OutdoorMountain

Cartography

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1 Introduction