Conclusion - Participatory Mapping: New Data, New Cartography - page 147

maps themselves. This is not in itself a surprising fact, as
the starting point of “neogeography”, i.e. the release of the
Google Maps API, aimed to make base maps accessible.
However, the validity of the map depends on what can be
visualized through them. As maps are part of the “Web of
platform”, they connect to other types of data, statistics,
contributory or dynamic, to create a composite application.
In the case of Fukushima, the opportunity to publish a map
fostered international cooperation to produce data from
Geiger counters and to reformat data published on official
Websites. Furthermore, it is to be noted that the map in its
mashup form has not evolved much since 2005, whereas the
data sources have diversified considerably. APIs are of
course regularly updated and OpenStreetMap has become a
pivot of geospatial Web, while the idea of mashup remains
unchanged. It consists of aggregating one or several data
sources on a base map to create a new application. On the
other side, it is the nature and the amount of data available
for mapping that is very different: the freedom of access to
public data has expanded and big data is becoming a
recurring theme. Thus, the future of Web maps depends on
their adaptability to constantly changing data sources.