BBC News: The map gap

Monday, 16 October, 2006

BBC News had an interesting article today entitled The map gap. It covers familiar catographic ground on how we actually represent an ellipsoidal Earth on a flat piece of paper (Nice quote from Steve Chilton: “If you peel an orange, you can’t lay it flat and there’s never an answer to that”); first year geographers, this is exactly why we have a lecture on map projections and coordinate systems! It then briefly introduces Google Earth (and ilk), mapping websites and the whole idea of “user-data” (e.g. OpenStreetMap) and mash-ups. Whilst the article itself doesn’t break any new ground, it is interesting in that it places cartography at the centre of these developments and subtlely (or unintentionally?) asks how the subject can respond to such rapid changes. And this is a good question; will cartography reduce to a niche subject as spatial data users continue to make visually poor (or wrong!) maps or can it re-invent itself? It also demonstrates how mainstream spatial data, visualisation and re-use (mash-ups) have become.