The information on this page is intended to define some of the technical terms and acronyms used in the site.

Bit
Short for binary digit, the smallest unit of digital information

Byte
Eight bits strung together

CMYK
Cyan (blue), Magenta (red), Yellow and Black. These are the four colours used in four-colour process printing.

Digital Proof
A proof produced directly from a computer, often in Acrobat PDF format. Care must be taken when considering digital proofs due to colour consistency. See also PDF below.

DPI
Dots per inch. This is how the resolution of a screen printer or scanner is measured.

Environmental Map
A map which shows the landscape as if viewed from space, with colours showing the vegetated and desert regions, and 3-D shading to depict the relief.

EPS
Encapsulated Post Script. A graphic file format. These files are 'device independent' or resolution independent. This means they will print at whatever resolution the printer happens to set to.

Equal Area
A map that shows all countries or regions at the correct area in relation to each other.

Fly-through
A technique that enables a virtual reality journey to be viewed on screen over a piece of landscape.

Geo-referencing
A system of x-y coordinates applied digitally to a map which enables any point on the map to be located automatically on calling up its coordinates. Alternatively clicking on to any point on the map will yield the coordinates of that point.

Gigabyte (GB)
1024 megabytes or 1,073,741,824 bytes

Hillshading
A technique used to simulate the effect of oblique lighting on the landscape (like the light of the setting sun) so that the topography appears to be in 3-D.

Interactive
A digital image or sequence on screen which the viewer can interrogate or manipulate by clicking on to selected points on the image, allowing data to be viewed.

Locator Map
A map which is specially drawn to enable the user to find a specific place, for example an office in a city.

Megabyte (MB)
1,048,576 bytes

PDF
A Portable Document Format file is a self-contained cross-platform document. In plain language, it is a file that will look the same on the screen and in print, regardless of what kind of computer or printer someone is using and regardless of what software package was originally used to create it.

Although they contain the complete formatting of the original document, including fonts and images, PDF files are highly compressed, allowing complex information to be downloaded efficiently.

Physical Map
The colours on the map are used to show altitude layers, for example green between 0 and 200 metres, yellow from 200 to 500 metres, and brown above 500 metres.

Political Map
Shows each country in a different colour.

Post Script
Software language developed by Adobe Systems that has become industry standard.

Projection
The technique used by cartographers to turn the spherical surface of the earth to a flat plane in order to represent it on a flat piece of paper. There are hundreds of different projections; none can be an absolutely faithful representation but certain qualities can be preserved, for example correct shape, distance or area.

Promotional Map
A map used to promote business, usually bearing a company name and logo.

Scale
The relation of the size of a map to the actual size of its area on the ground, expressed as a "representative fraction". For example 1: 1 million means one unit of length on the map represents one million such units on the ground. Scale can also be expressed as a "scale bar" on the map, for example showing the length of a mile or kilometre on the map. The term "large scale" is generally applied to maps at scales larger than 1:25,000.

SkyRover
The trade name used by Oxford Cartographers for a technique to enable virtual reality traverse of a landscape from above.

Star fold
A map that has a combination of rectangular and diagonal folds so that on opening it resembles a star shape. It allows the map to open in a single action.

Thematic Map
A map that depicts a particular subject, for example population density or wheat production.

TIFF
A TIFF file stands for Tagged Image File Format and was designed for storing black and white, grayscale, or color bitmap images. The TIFF format is often used for bitmap images due to it's cross-platform compatibility (Windows and Macintosh). As TIFF files are uncompressed retain better image quality than a JPEG or GIF file, especially when printing.

Topographical Map
A map which shows the geographic detail of a region, often used to describe maps that include contouring.

Virtual reality
A digital simulation of a land surface or a city as opposed to an actual photograph.