Conclusion
A few years after Daniel Stalpaert produced his map, around 1669,
Jan Vermeer painted the "Geographer"
.
It shows something of the fascination the new technology of mapping had
in those days. The same sense of fascination comes up when viewing
current developments in WebMapping. It is almost
unbelievable that any piece of earth information can be combined with
any other piece. Thanks to MapServer this can now be done on every
computer with access to the Internet. Cost of hardware and
software is no problem any more. The great challenge for the
coming years is putting this technology to use with good data. This
is especially the case in Europe, where map data, even
from the governments, are protected
by huge commercial and privacy barriers.In the current
situation, the modelling of public space is as good as
uncontrollable, It is to be hoped
that this inaccessibility of public data will be
remedied in the same way that MapServer solved the problem of access
to software and methodology.