American Cartography 2011: Benchmarks and Projections: An Editorial Preface to the National Report of the United States to the International Cartographic Association (Editorial‪)‬

Introduction The age of ubiquitous cartography has arrived. Maps, whether defined narrowly or broadly, are a part of our technology-filled lives more than ever before; each new day surely sets an all-time record for the number of maps produced, manipulated, and used in the world. And those maps are changing in ways that are obvious today but impossible to have imagined a few short years ago. Interactive and dynamic maps are no longer novel conveniences but de rigueur necessities for an amazingly diverse collection of uses and users: a traveler planning an international voyage expects that a web search for a hotel to be map-driven; a smartphone manufacturer bases advertising on the quality, detail, and usefulness of its maps; a teenager moves through a virtual game world with a meticulously designed, multiple-level-of-detail map; a newspaper includes interactive graphics that allow a reader to visualize and analyze developing stories; a worldwide software corporation constantly improves its interactive maps to keep up with competing products; a cyclist shares knowledge of potholes and angry dogs along her route with others via wiki-based mapping applications; a government agency responds to user (and inter-agency) demand for user-friendly geo-interfaces to its spatial data; an emergency manager coordinates responses to a national security threat with an interactive map as the framework; a community organizer for a small non-profit shares experiences of individuals from his community through a grassroots public mapping project; an aid worker directs resources according to a up-to-the-minute map that shows geo-referenced tweets, photos, and messages from individuals directly affected by an earthquake or tsunami--a map that can quite literally save lives. Cartography continues its renaissance--we can answer the question "hasn't the world already been mapped?" with the astonishing answer "there has never been so much to map."