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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.