100 words - day 15

Scale

This really goes hand in hand with the co-ordinate system you might want to use, as well as considering who the audience will be and where the map will be used or displayed. Obviously if you are printing a map then you chose one scale to represent the part of the world you are showing as is done on the Ordnance Survey maps that come in different scale e.g. OS Explorer 1:25,000. This means that every 1cm on the paper map represents 25,000cm or 250m in the real world.

Naturally, depending on the amount of detail you need you can use different scales. For example a road map covering the entire UK that can be viewed together would need to have a smaller scale that covers a larger area.

Digital maps and scale

As we now use digital maps so much of the time it is still important to consider scale, but perhaps in a slightly different way. Now we can zoom in and out on our computers and phones with such ease we can see the world at different scales very easily. In fact Google Street View allows us access to the detailed view of places on the planet like never before. But as we are all aware you only see certain details when you zoom to certain scales. This can easily be programmed when building a digital map and is critical to making a good map otherwise the map would become over complicated and cluttered.

Lately there are also issues of privacy that have entered into the world mapping in such detail, do we all want the world to be able to zoom to our front door? If you have ever seen a blurry part of a street on Google Street View this is a way to try and increase individual privacy, but as the world is ever more connected this level of privacy crops up all over the place.