Argleton is a place that doesn't exist - except on Google Maps.
The story is developing since about a week, brought up by The Telegraph:

Google and the company that supplies its mapping data are unable to explain the presence of the phantom town and are investigating.

Tantalisingly, “Argle” echoes the word “Google”, while the phantom town’s name is also an anagram of “Not Real G”, and “Not Large”.

One theory is that Argleton could have been deliberately added, as a trap to catch companies that violate the map's copyright, The Telegraph states. If that was true, statements beyond would contradict - as a mapmaker you'd better know where bogus data is. Google is clueless and Tele Atlas said it would now wipe the non-existent town from the map, quote:

"Mistakes like this are not common, and I really can't explain why these anomalies get into our database."

As the story from The Telegraph is from Oct31 it'll be intersting to see when Argleton will actually be "wiped". One more week?

John Krygier has a must-read piece on the art of mapmaking accompanied by wonderful illustrations.

Examples are illustrated by Prof. Kei Kanazawa (heading the Working Group of the Japan Cartographers Association) in a chapter entitled “Techniques of Map Drawing and Lettering” in the out-of-print book Basic Cartography, Vol. 1 (International Cartographic Association, 1984, p. 45). These guidelines were developed for the pen and ink era of cartography, yet most are applicable to contemporary digital mapping.

What strikes me most is the somehow redundant notion that almost none of those guiding principles are properly reflected in contemporary online maps - including our own visualisation.

"The majority of these guidelines focus on peculiar details that when done well, the typical map user won’t even notice. They are among the fascinating hyper-minutiae of cartography."

From the manner of connecting line symbols corresponding to broken lines (first illustration) to crossing line symbols (last one), this is sheer beauty in detail.

All this is old knowledge and learned craftsmanship to cartographers and sadly diluted by the inability of contemporary online mapping tools to produce and display the "fineprint".

Yes, we know the reasons all too well - the more detail you put in, the bigger the map gets, the slower it builds etc pp - but wouldn't it be worthwhile going back some steps towards a more readable, more conceivable and much more aesthetic display?

Read the original article and zoom into the larger pictures - and a tip-on-the-hat to John Krygier for digging this out!

GIS data doesn't have a look before it takes on a visual representation. James Fee points out all you need to know in a worthwhile piece here.

For mere historical reasons as it seems, the naked payload data on Shape-files always needs to be accompanied by sidecar files for storing symbology, metadata and other human readable information. As clean it is programmatically to have content and display separated, the more trouble it generates downstream if GIS numerology needs to take on gestalt and visualisation. By the way, Gestalt in German literally means "shape" or "figure".

When we started United Maps, one of the first and naive questions I posted to the ESRI folks was about a CSS-like method of styling large amounts of GIS-data, whole countries on a 1:2000 scale and 21 zoom levels. I could have asked for their latest extraterrestial communication a their eyes went funny. Such a thing would not exist, the answer was, at least not as I envisioned it.

Things may have changed into the right direction: there is a project to convert CSS into Mapnik acting as "an abstraction layer and preprocessor that converts special, CSS-like syntax into Mapnik-compatible style definitions". As James Fee puts it:

CSS is very easy to edit and and work with and  Mapnik is great at rendering cartography (and could easily be supported by desktop clients). CSS gets stored as a sidecar file to the dataset and the rich cartography can be read with Mapnik to render the maps as the author wishes the maps to look. 

Pierre from the czech site Tydlevidle comments:

ESRI’s lyr is of course a direct serialization of all the associated objects, which is after all very flexible and supports symbols, renderers and objects other which are not yet implemented or come from third-party developers.

Takes me into a loop - how can we compare the ol' ESRI workhorse approach to the CSS trick pony that Sean Gillies points to here, animating Homer Simpson only using CSS? What's the limits of CSS, how quickly does it render large scale, highly detailed maps, does it work well on mobile browsers? The really long thread of 60 comments beyond the original article carries a lot more.

Jeffrey Warren from the MIT Media Lab's Design Ecology group runs cartagen.org, ...

... a set of tools for mapping, enabling users to view and configure live streams of geographic data in a dynamic, personally relevant way. These tools helps users to analyze and view collected and shared geographic and temporal data from multiple sources. The framework uses vector-based, context-sensitive drawing methods to describe data, not merely in terms of lines and polygons, but also with adaptive use of color, movement, and projection.

As Jeffrey demonstrated at WhereCamp, CSS can be put to work:

All done with GSS-Styles like this:

body: {
    fillStyle: "#fff",
    lineWidth: 0,
    
},
node: {
    fillStyle: "#ddd",
    strokeStyle: "#090",
    lineWidth: 0,
    radius: 1
},
way: {
    strokeStyle: function() { 
        return "rgba(1,1,1,0.7)"
        //return color_from_string(this.user)
    },
    strokeStyle: "#ccc",
    lineWidth: 3
},
leisure: {
    fillStyle: "#2a2",
    lineWidth: 3,
    strokeStyle: "#181"
},
park: {
    fillStyle: "#2a2",
    lineWidth: 3,
    strokeStyle: "#181",
    pattern: "/images/pattern-water.gif"
},

Hey, how smart is that!

From Strange Maps:

Ciudad Evita is perhaps the world’s weirdest marriage of urban planning and personality cult. Evita City was founded in 1947 by Argentinian President Juan Domingo Peron. By Presidential Decree No. 33221, he willed into existence this new suburb of Argentinia’s capital city Buenos Aires. Exceptionally, the perpendicular street lay-out so typical of new cities in the Americas for this project.

Now explain someone you're "living near the nostrils" ...

Here's the talk we presented at Telematics Munich 2008:

Comments are opened -- you're welcome to give feedback.

United Maps „fills the gaps in road networks“ adding building footprints, pedestrians paths, mass transit information and relevant topical layers.