page_title: Map
section_title: Geographic maps
hierarchical_section_title: Map / Geographic maps
caption_attribution_description: Latina: Planisphærium cœleste English: Celestial map from 1670, by the Dutch cartographer Frederik de Wit. Français&#160;: Carte céleste du XVIIe siècle, réalisée par le cartographe hollandais Frederik de Wit.
context_page_description: A map is a symbolic depiction emphasizing relationships between elements of some space, such as objects, regions, or themes.
  Many maps are static, fixed to paper or some other durable medium, while others are dynamic or interactive. Although most commonly used to depict geography, maps may represent any space, real or fictional, without regard to context or scale, such as in brain mapping, DNA mapping, or computer network topology mapping. The space being mapped may be two dimensional, such as the surface of the earth, three dimensional, such as the interior of the earth, or even more abstract spaces of any dimension, such as arise in modeling phenomena having many independent variables.
  Although the earliest maps known are of the heavens, geographic maps of territory have a very long tradition and exist from ancient times. The word "map" comes from the medieval Latin Mappa mundi, wherein mappa meant napkin or cloth and mundi the world. Thus, "map" became a shortened term referring to a two-dimensional representation of the surface of the world.
context_section_description: Cartography or map-making is the study and practice of crafting representations of the Earth upon a flat surface (see History of cartography), and one who makes maps is called a cartographer.
  Road maps are perhaps the most widely used maps today, and form a subset of navigational maps, which also include aeronautical and nautical charts, railroad network maps, and hiking and bicycling maps. In terms of quantity, the largest number of drawn map sheets is probably made up by local surveys, carried out by municipalities, utilities, tax assessors, emergency services providers, and other local agencies.  Many national surveying projects have been carried out by the military, such as the British Ordnance Survey: a civilian government agency, internationally renowned for its comprehensively detailed work.
  In addition to location information, maps may also be used to portray contour lines indicating constant values of elevation, temperature, rainfall, etc.
caption: A celestial map from the 17th century, by the  cartographer Frederik de Wit
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