One important concern of cartography is solving how to project, i.e. transform or map points from an almost spherical lump of rock (our Earth) onto either flat sheets of paper or not-so flat phosphorus-coated glass.

Here are informally described important cartographic concepts, how maps are drawn and why there are so many different kinds of projections for world maps. You may start reading here and follow the Click buttons like this one to go ahead buttons, or use this table of contents:

BirdEye is a community project to advance the design and development of a comprehensive open source information visualization and visual analytics library for Adobe Flex. The actionscript-based library enables users to create multi-dimensional data visualization interfaces for the analysis and presentation of information. The project is based on development and the integration/adoption of related open source libraries (see credits and attributions). For status of development, refer to the wiki pages.