General-purpose maps provide many types of information on one map. Most atlas maps, wall maps, and road maps fall into this category. The following are some features that might be shown on a general-p ...
Diagrams such as schematic diagrams and Gantt charts and treemaps display logical relationships between items, and do not display spatial relationships at all.Some maps, for example the London Undergr ...
Maps exist of the solar system, and other cosmological features such as star maps. In addition maps of other bodies such as the Moon and other planets are technically not geographical maps.
To communicate spatial information effectively, features such as rivers, lakes, and cities need to be labeled. Over centuries cartographers have developed the art of placing names on even the densest ...
The various features shown on a map are represented by conventional signs or symbols. For example, colors can be used to indicate a classification of roads. Those signs are usually explained in the ma ...
From the last quarter of the 20th century, the indispensable tool of the cartographer has been the computer. Much of cartography, especially at the data-gathering survey level, has been subsumed by Ge ...
Maps of the world or large areas are often either 'political' or 'physical'. The most important purpose of the political map is to show territorial borders; the purpose of the physical is to show feat ...
Many, but not all, maps are drawn to a scale, expressed as a ratio such as 1:10,000, meaning that 1 of any unit of measurement on the map corresponds exactly, or approximately, to 10,000 of that same ...
The orientation of a map is the relationship between the directions on the map and the corresponding compass directions in reality. The word "orient" is derived from Latin oriens, meaning East. In the ...
Cartography or map-making is the study and practice of crafting representations of the Earth upon a flat surface (see History of cartography), and one who makes maps is called a cartographer.Road maps ...
elements of that space such as objects, regions, and themes.Many maps are static two-dimensional, geometrically accurate (or approximately accurate) representations of three-dimensional space, while o ...
