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Article: How good are your maps? (Data Accuracy).
- Article from:
- GEO World
- Article date:
- February 1, 2002
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 2002 Bev-AL Communications, Inc. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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If a picture is worth a thousand words, how many more words is a map worth? Ten times as many? A hundred times? A thousand times? Consider the last map you glanced at, and suppose you were to write down every fact depicted on it. The list would include the names of everything shown on the map, plus the relative distances between everything, plus the spatial relationships between everything and everything else, plus information about things not shown on the map, plus all the relative relationships, etc.
Maps are such concise conveyors of information, because they're scaled representations of reality. As such, their use and value depends on their accuracy or, more ...