Cartography: maps 2.0

Abstract

At 11.35 am PDT on 18 September 2007 at Vandenberg Air Force base in California, DigitalGlobe’s new WorldView-1 satellite launched into orbit. The satellite is capable of collecting imagery over as much as three-quarters of a million square kilometers a day in resolution as fi ne as 0.5 m. A second satellite will be launched in 2008, capable of photographing nearly a million square kilometers daily at the same high resolution. The data are twice the resolution of the pre-vious industry leader, the IKONOS satellite launched in 1999 and close to the military’s own resolution of 10 cm (Monmonier, 2002).What is significant about the launch is not only the extent and resolution of the imagery (which from all vendors now covers over half of the world’s population) but also the fact that this imagery will be available commercially (look for it in Google Earth). Such imagery, alongside the tremendous possibilities of ‘crowdsourced’ geospatial data, represent interesting new develop-ments in cartography.In the fi rst of three reviews assessing the current state of cartography, I focus on the explosion of new ‘spatial media’ on the web. This topic goes under a bewildering number of names including the geospatial web or geoweb (Scharl and Tochtermann, 2007), neogeography (Turner, 2006), locative media (Rheingold, 2002), DigiPlace (Zook and Graham, 2007a), spatial crowdsourcing or geocollaboration (Hopfer and MacEachren, 2007) and map hacking (Erle