The Cartography of GeoWeb Base Maps and "Rolling Your Own"

The first of our series on “Cartography and the GeoWeb” covers the cartography of GeoWeb base maps – one of the most obvious places cartography is applied on the GeoWeb. The tiles from Google, Yahoo and Microsoft are nearly ubiquitous in map mashups. As each of the technology giants got into the mapping game, they had to make many cartographic decisions on how they would present data on a map. This leads to a myriad of mapping option ranging from the color palette selected for map elements, to font and to the placement of labels on the map. To see the effect these different choices can have on a base map, check a comparison of cartography for the street base maps of the three providers below:

Yahoo Maps

Microsoft Virtual Earth

Google Maps

When it comes to cartographic design I would rank it 1) Yahoo 2) MSVE 3) Google, which should not be too surprising since Yahoo! hired a bunch of cartographers to design theirs. Since Yahoo! unveiled their new cartography, Google has introduced terrain view and MSVE has added elevation reliefs to their maps as well – although I cannot for the life of me find a reference to when the upgrade happened.

While the race for more content, and sometimes more cartography, has raged amongst the big three providers, there has been a backlash in the developer community. This was most poignantly seen in Paul Smith’s “Take Control of Your Map” article on A List Apart. As you can see in the screen shots above, the base maps from Google, Yahoo and Microsoft have become pretty crowded and dense. Many Web designers would like to control the design on their maps the same way they do their Web pages leading to a movement to “roll your own maps”.

This movement has leveraged the pioneering work of OpenStreetMaps to create their own independent base maps for streets. The OSM effort led to creation of applications like Mapnik and Osmarender to style the GPS data they collected for the project, although both are some what notorious for their lack of usability. This has not stopped EveryBlock from using Mapnik to make custom maps for their data.

The map is definitely less busy than the big three providers, and I believe suits EveryBlocks purposes well, although I might have gone with a different color combination. The beauty, though, of EveryBlock’s approach is that if I wanted another color sequence, I could take Mapnik and OSM data and have at it. I believe it is just one of the many examples we’ll see democratizing cartography – allowing the public to “roll their own”.