Towards Ubiquitous Cartography‪.‬

Introduction Maps can now be created and used by any individual with modest computing skills, from virtually any location on the Earth's surface, and for almost any purpose. The ubiquitous nature of what is, essentially, one-off cartography is indeed a world away from the pen-and-ink era of map-making where highly skilled crafts people labored long hours to produce general purpose maps that were reproduced in large numbers. In this new map-making paradigm users are often embedded at the location of interest and produce maps that address needs that arise in real time. Cartographic material may be delivered to the user in finished form, or it may be constructed by the user in situ. These users are often untrained in cartographic methods and interested in context-specific spatial and a spatial information. A query might, tot example, produce a map of all Italian restaurants within one kilometer of a user's current location, create a route linking all museum exhibits that share a common theme, or produce links to online repositories of maps, images, documents, or data that provide a user with a deeper understanding of the phenomenon that he or she is observing. The technological developments that make such map-making activities possible require the cartographic community to rethink traditional cartographic bounds of scale, content, context, media, and use.