Maps are actually a hard problem to solve. When I got my certificate in GIS 20 years ago, people had no idea what GIS was. I worked at a Fortune 500 company for

Maps are actually a hard problem to solve. When I got my certificate in GIS 20 years ago, people had no idea what GIS was. I worked at a Fortune 500 company for over 5 years paying accident claims and exactly one person knew what GIS was when they met me. I was taught that good data is hard to come by and can be 60 percent of the cost of a project. GPS can be very accurate if you use enough satellites for enough time, but that is probably the exception not the norm. Much GPS data is more like within about 30 feet of the thing. When the international foot was defined in 1959, a great deal of survey data was already available based on the former definitions, especially in the United States and in India. The small difference between the survey foot and the international foot would not be detectable on a survey of a small parcel, but becomes significant for mapping, or when the state plane coordinate system (SPCS) is used in the US, because the origin of the system may be hundreds of thousands of feet (hundreds of miles) from the point of interest. Hence the previous definitions continued to be used for surveying in the United States and India for many years, and are denoted survey feet to distinguish them from the international foot. The United Kingdom was unaffected by this problem, as the retriangulation of Great Britain (1936–62) had been done in meters. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foot_(unit) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foot_(unit) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imperial_and_US_customary_measurement_systems https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imperial_and_US_customary_me... A fundamental issue is that Maps are 2D and Earth is 3D. Additionally, Earth is not a perfect sphere. This is part of why there are many different map projections, each of which distort something and thus your projection should be chosen based on what you are trying to show on the map. Some projections are better for, say, just North America. Maps also say as much or more about the mind of the map maker as they do geographic reality. We record a lot of human or political data in maps and biases in how dominant cultures view the world can be readily seen in how we map the world. There are interesting videos about maps of Oceania that show this very clearly, for example: https://youtu.be/tCsHWmAKCgQ https://youtu.be/tCsHWmAKCgQ In spite of having a Certificate in GIS, I've never managed to do some of the technical things I've wanted to do with open source. I do use open source tiles and Paint to make maps I like for some of my websites. Please don't underestimate how hard this problem space is. I wish there were more options in the mapping space that served my needs. I've looked around at times and found that many of the available resources simply can't do what I want. I hope this is successful and I look forward to reading up on it more and seeing if it may be relevant to my needs.