Web mapping

Web Mapping

"Web Mapping is the process of designing, implementing, generating and delivering maps and atlases on the worldwide web (WWW). While "Web Mapping" primarily deals with technological issues, "Web Cartography" additionally studies theoretic aspects: the use of web maps, the evaluation and optimization of techniques and workflows, the usability of web maps, social aspects, and more. The use of the web as a dissemination medium for maps can be regarded as a major advancement in cartography and opened many new opportunities, such as realtime maps, cheaper dissemination, more frequent and cheaper updates of data and software, personalized map content, distributed data sources and sharing of geographic information. On the other hand it also implicates many challenges due to technical restrictions (low display resolution and limited bandwidth, in particular with small devices), copyright and security issues, reliability issues and technical complexity. While the first web maps had been primarily static, due to technical restrictions, today's web maps can be fully interactive and integrate multiple media. This means that both web mapping and web cartography also has to deal with interactivity, usability and multimedia issues.

The advent of web mapping can be regarded as the beginning of a democratization process of cartography. Previously, cartography was restricted to a few companies, institutes and mapping agencies, requiring expensive and complex hard- and software as well as skilled cartographers and geomatics engineers. With web mapping, freely available mapping technologies and geodata potentially allow every skilled person to produce web maps, with expensive geodata and technical complexity (data harmonization, missing standards) being two of the remaining barriers preventing web mapping from fully going mainstream. The cheap and easy transfer of geodata across the internet allows the integration of distributed data sources, opening opportunities that go beyond the possibilities of disjoint data storage. Everyone with minimal knowhow and infrastructure can become a geodata provider. These facts can be regarded both as an advantage and a disadvantage. While it allows everyone to produce maps and considerably enlarges the audience, it also puts geodata in the hands of untrained people who potentially violate cartographic and geographic principles and introduce flaws during the preparation, analysis and presentation of geographic and cartographic data. Educating the general public about geographic analysis and cartographic methods and principles should therefore be a priority to the cartography community.