Interactive and Animated Cartography

This theme is one that has come to surface into the mainstream within the past few years. I can remember when the term "interactive and animated cartography" was pretty much limited to maps that were simply put into slide shows for what ever reason the presenter saw fit to explain their point. And although my knowledge of this subject isn't on the cutting edge of the technology that we have now, I do know that it has grown by leaps and bounds and that we are now able to make and view complete animations using G.I.S. and satelite imagery. These animations are not only impressive, but extremely useful in presenting information and keeping the audience interested in this technology based world. Please be reminded that what I am talking about is the animated cartography portion here. In its simplest form, animated cartography is just a slideshow of maps. Now days, you can view areas of the earths surface in three dimentional forms as though you are in an airplane or a bird even flying through the air looking at them. When constructing these animated presentations, you can change everything from the level of zoom you want your audience to see, to the different features you want either included or omitted. These features make this sort of cartographic presentation very effective to prove points and inform audiences.

When we delve into the interactive cartography, we are exploring another form of electronic cartography that allows us to obviously interact with the map. One of my favorite examples of this is something that I generally take for granted because I use it so frequently. I never really realized that I was using this form of interractive cartography because it was just a new feature in a common search engine I use. When searching the local location for things, often times you are presented with a list of the search results and a simple map with these locations mapped on it. Usually, these are small baloons with letters that correlate to the list that is also provided. But, these balloons are clickable for further information. A perfect example is the link I'm providing of my latest search (http://www.google.com/maps?hl=en&q=car+wash&near=Reno,+NV&ie=UTF8&z=12&ll=39.518344,-119.800415&spn=0.114149,0.2314&om=1) This search took me a matter of seconds and I was able to pick the car wash closest to my location. With out the interactive feature of this map and being able to zoom in and out, I would have been searching for up to an hour trying to figure out what kind of car wash it was and if it was close by referencing the addresses to a map of some sorts. So although, very very complex in terms of composition, these interractive maps are so very easy to use on a day to day basis and they are quickly becoming part of many peoples daily lives. And remember, this is just a drop in the bucked compared to what is actually out there, but I wanted to give an example of something that many people use day to day in order to show that this is becoming part of many people's lives and they don't even realize it.