Maps | Introduction

Where am I?

Knowledge of location has been important to most forms of life on Earth. Whether it is used for annual migrations of birds and animals and for early neolithic hunters. The great navigators such as James Cook explored and mapped parts of the world for the very first time.
Today - we know where our relatives and friends live. We take it for granted that we have a host of maps and even sat navs on our mobiles. We are all mappers now - even so some people still get lost when out of their local environment.

Hooked on maps

For many of us knowledge of place and location is always with us, almost another sense. It could be somewhere we had a memorable holiday, a sports event or a location associated with someone. These places are silent witnesses over generations and the passage of time.

Personally I have always recalled events by their location as well as reading maps as one would read a book. The Make a Map page explores first steps in mapping from a personal perspective.

What is the purpose of the map?

In 1969 I joined Ordnance Survey as a surveyor. . This turned out to be the start of a fascinating four decades where the entire process of map making changed completely and it continues to do so. In the era of web mapping we are confronted by all kinds of new questions around map data, eg. how we combine it with other kinds of data. A lot of data is collected by public bodies and the role each of organisation plays into the great melting pot of geodata. .
This issue is illustrated by the What Map? page exploring the purpose of a map and the interrelationships with information from third parties.

The Landscape and beyond

Once I moved to North Wales, working for OSGB, I realised a deeper interest than making maps. It was about the topography of the landscape and the evolution of the Earth. The features that make up our current landscape have developed over billions of years and those processes continue. The map is a way of 'capturing' that landscape and those features. It enables any reader to visit and explore places from afar. Maps are also an essential part of democracy. As we build up epochs of mapping we can also become time travellers and explorers ...

.. and of the universe, since we are now mapping other planets, galaxies and the entire cosmos.