Ana Kuveždić Divjak

World political map from OpenStreetMap data

ABSTRACT The paper presents the development of an automated procedure for creating a small-scale world political map from OpenStreetMap (OSM) data, and the map itself. A novel approach was used for cartographic processing, while the fitness for use of OSM data for this task was evaluated. It was anticipated and shown that creating a world political map from OSM data is a methodologically and technologically demanding task. The result was a political map of the world at a scale of 1:30,000,000, showing independent states, dependencies and areas of special sovereignty as in the OSM data set, with no adaptation to specific political recognition issues. A high degree of automation built on open-source software was achieved. The resulting map is an intermediate stage of production, requiring modest manual intervention for the final map. By allocating a code to the community (http://github.com/GEOF-OSGL/OSMPoliticalMap), we have provided opportunities for its continuing development.

Famous People and Map Projections

Map projections have been developed in parallel with the development of map production and cartography in general. Development of sciences, technical achievements and needs of everyday life have gradually increased demands for production of various topographic and thematic maps in various scales and for various purposes, which required continuous improvement of map projections and mathematical basis of maps. Beginnings of map projections date as far as two thousand years ago, when ancient Greek scientists applied mathematical principles to projecting Earth and the starry sky and started applying the graticule. Hundreds of map projections have been invented since the antique. Many people have been interested in the theory of map projections and have written about them. Since there are so many of them, we decided to make a narrower selection of abut 40 people. Those people are presented in chronological rather than alphabetical order in this chapter. Their most important contributions to map projections are described and illustrated.