Mapmaking has always been a complex process, requiring cartographers to weigh political situations, among others, against the needs of their audience.

BBC: The politics of making maps

Haven't we lost something important as mapmaking has become a science of logarithms and apps and precisely calibrated directions?

WSJ: Lost in Our Maps: A History of Cartographic Catastrophes

Maps and GPS (global positioning system) navigation in cars are very popular, and all of those maps came from one of just two mapmaking companies.

NPR: Map-Making Firms Rumored to Sell for Billions

Since the Nokia announcement, officials in the mapmaking industry have been speculating about the shape of their future world if both these deals go through.

NPR: Map-Making Firms Rumored to Sell for Billions

He spent time with his grandchildren and travelled, and, having been an avid sailor all his life, he had just finished writing a book on nineteenth-century naval mapmaking.

NEWYORKER: Personal Best

Instead, Google could simply recreate the data far more cheaply by tapping the mapmaking skills of its hundreds of millions of users a wiki of maps, he suggests.

FORBES: Nokia Redraws The Map

Mr Brotton, a professor of Renaissance Studies at Queen Mary University of London, examines the complexity of mapmaking through the stories of 12 maps, which stretch across space and over time.

ECONOMIST: There is no such thing as an objective map

This mapmaking duopoly started to unravel last summer.

NPR: Map-Making Firms Rumored to Sell for Billions