Plat

The creation of a plat map is also an important step in the process of incorporating a town or city according to United States law. Because the process of incorporation must be done at a courthouse, the incorporation papers for many American cities may be stored hundred of miles away in another state. For example, the original plat for the city of San Francisco, California, filed in 1849, is kept at the Clackamas County courthouse in Oregon City, Oregon, then the capital of the Oregon Territory and the site of closest federal land office. This is because California did not become part ...

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Plat, Plat - History

Read more here: » Plat: Encyclopedia II - Plat - History

A map is a simplified depiction of a space, a navigational aid which highlights relations between objects within that space. Most usually a map is a two-dimensional, geometrically accurate representation of a three-dimensional space. The science and art of map-making is cartography. Map - Introduction. Map-making dates back to the Stone Age and appears to predate written language by several millennia. One of the oldest surviving maps is painted on a wall of the Catal Huyuk settlement in south-central ...

Including:

• Map - Introduction
• Map - Orientation of maps
• Map - Scale and accuracy
• Map - World maps and projections
• Map - Electronic maps

Read more here: » Map: Encyclopedia - Map

Map-making dates back to the Stone Age and appears to predate written language by several millennia. One of the oldest surviving maps is painted on a wall of the Catal Huyuk settlement in south-central Anatolia (now Turkey); it dates from about 6200 BC. [Harvey 2000, p. 142]. While we tend to think of maps today as products of a rationalistic, scientific world-view, maps also have a mythic quality. Pre-modern maps, and mapping traditions outside the Western tradition, often merge geography with non-scientific cosmography, showing the ...

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Map, Map - Introduction, Map - Orientation of maps, Map - Scale and accuracy, Map - World maps and projections, Map - Electronic maps

Read more here: » Map: Encyclopedia II - Map - Introduction

From the last quarter of the 20th century, the indispensable tool of the cartographer has been the computer. Much of cartography, especially at the data-gathering survey level, has been subsumed by Geographic Information Systems (GIS). Even when GIS is not involved, most cartographers now use a variety of computer graphics programs to generate new maps. Interactive, computerised maps are commercially available, allowing users to zoom in or zoom out (respectively meaning to increase or decrease the scale), sometimes by replacing ...

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Map, Map - Introduction, Map - Orientation of maps, Map - Scale and accuracy, Map - World maps and projections, Map - Electronic maps

Read more here: » Map: Encyclopedia II - Map - Electronic maps

Many but not all maps are drawn to a scale, allowing the reader to infer the actual sizes of, and distances between, depicted objects. A larger scale shows more detail, thus requiring a larger map to show the same area. For example, maps designed for the hiker are often scaled at the ratio 1:24,000, meaning that 1 of any unit of measurement on the map corresponds to 24,000 of that same unit in reality; while maps designed for the motorist are often scaled at 1:250,000. Maps which use some quality other than physical area to dete ...

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Map, Map - Introduction, Map - Orientation of maps, Map - Scale and accuracy, Map - World maps and projections, Map - Electronic maps

Read more here: » Map: Encyclopedia II - Map - Scale and accuracy

Conventionally, on most geometrically accurate maps text is upright when the map is oriented with the north up, hence north is identified with the top of a sheet. Maps that don't put north at the top: Polar maps Dymaxion maps Some rectangular maps produced in Australia show the south pole at the top. To someone used to seeing the map the other way around, this map may appear to be "upside down". These are primarily intended as novelty and tourist maps. Other modern maps put south on top, general ...

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Map, Map - Introduction, Map - Orientation of maps, Map - Scale and accuracy, Map - World maps and projections, Map - Electronic maps

Read more here: » Map: Encyclopedia II - Map - Orientation of maps

Maps of the world or large areas are often either 'political' or 'physical'. The most important purpose of the political map is to show territorial borders; the purpose of the physical is to show features of geography such as mountains, soil type or land use. Geological maps show not only the physical surface, but characteristics of the underlying rock, fault lines, and subsurface structures. Maps that depict the surface of the Earth also use a projection, a way of translating the three-dimensional real surface of the geoid to a two-dimensional picture. Perhaps the best-kn ...

See also:

Map, Map - Introduction, Map - Orientation of maps, Map - Scale and accuracy, Map - World maps and projections, Map - Electronic maps

Read more here: » Map: Encyclopedia II - Map - World maps and projections