But cartographers with a more international audience, like Google, have to be particularly sensitive.
Given the difficulty, most cartographers have guidelines for determining how to deal with potential complications.
Silicon Valley cartographers held their first mash-up camp in February in Mountain View, Calif.
But the scale of the regulatory system has taken even some of its cartographers by surprise.
Mapmakers may be geographers and cartographers, but they can also be artists and imperialists, storytellers and propagandists.
Mapmaking has always been a complex process, requiring cartographers to weigh political situations, among others, against the needs of their audience.
Apple may find the task of building a team of cartographers daunting when compared to its usual tech work.
Browsing takes visitors through Thailand, Burma, Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam, Indonesia, and Malaysia: Borders shift and names change, reflecting colonial whim and cartographers' burgeoning knowledge.
It allowed the firm to fill in blanks to the third-party data it had licensed at a time when its own cartographers were focused on other territories.
Even locals and compass equipped cartographers lose their way in millennia-old Medina streets flanked by some 3, 000 derbs (winding alleys), which predate city planning and defy satellite mapping.
French clocks were set to it, French cartographers observed it.
The Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges once wrote a story about an empire so obsessed with maps that its cartographers constructed a map as large as the empire itself.
The Mountains of Kong didn't actually exist, but like an unreliable Wikipedia entry that appears in a million college essays, the range was reproduced on maps by cartographers who should have known better.
WSJ: Lost in Our Maps: A History of Cartographic Catastrophes
The borders of Syria, Saudi Arabia, Iraq and Lebanon were drawn up in 1916 by French and British cartographers, indifferent to the realities of tribal life straddling the new lines emerging over the desert sands.
Mountain View's digital cartographers are training residents to use equipment like the Street View tricycle to take in the isolated territory's natural beauty while letting locals fill in the finer details (like roads, lakes and rivers) at community Map Up gatherings.
ENGADGET: Google mapping out Canada's Nunavut territory with local community, Street View trike
应用推荐