Tim Warr’s Blog

The Telegraph newspaper has a good story suggesting traditional map reading is a dying skill due to the increasing use of web mapping and sat navs.  I was impressed with how well researched it was. 

I spend a lot of time walking in the mountains and still feel that paper maps and magnetic compass are still the best ‘interface’ for hiking (and I have shunned GPS so far).  OK so call me a Luddite…  But, navigation in urban areas is a different story where I want to use more current technologies as the environment changes faster and I want to search rich data.  For example an Ordnance Survey Landranger map is not much use for finding deep crust pizza in London, but a mapping client on my mobile is.  So perhaps we are entering a new urban/rural divide with new mapping/navigation technologies? 

But web mapping can still cover traditional cartography too.  What this story (and the similar bbc story) missed, was the fact that you can access ‘traditional’ cartography on Web Mapping.  For example on multimap.com you can use Ordnance Survey mapping (see this example) and Bartholomew’s mapping (see).  These will show: “…landmarks such as the Science Museum, Royal Albert Hall and the Natural History Museum, which could not be found on Google Maps.”

It also worth looking at http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/7587415.stm for a good debate on this where Adrian Miles puts up a spirited defence of web mapping (and even touches on the Free Our Data debate!)

Update

A good forum debate on the BBC site has started here

Ed Parsons has leapt to the defence of web mapping against those old school cartographers here.