MAKING THE ULTIMATE MAP

There it is, that good old pale blue dot in all its earthly glory, right there on your computer screen. It's a familiar sight, even from a sky-high perspective experienced only by astronauts and angels. But hold on. By mousing around and clicking, you swoop like Superman, down, down, down, to a location on terra firma. Coastlines and rivers come into view, then cities, houses and even cars. And then, with another mouseclick, you can see the roads labeled, highlight the high-crime areas and locate the nearest Chinese restaurant. (The photography is provided by a combination of satellite images and pictures from aircraft flyovers.) If an alien flying-saucer jockey ever had an urge for chicken in black-bean sauce, this software would come in handy.

This particular Web-based program is called Keyhole and costs under $100. (Spy agencies used to spend millions for this, and they didn't even get the restaurant overlay!) But it's just one impressive product of many in an area marked by furious innovation. Digital mapping is about to change our world by documenting the real world, then integrating that information into our computers, phones and lifestyles. Roll over, Mason and Dixon: spurred by space photography, global satellite positioning, mobile phones, search engines and new ways of marking information for the World Wide Web, the ancient art of cartography is now on the cutting edge.

"The whole area of mapping is exploding in a lot of different directions," says Tom Bailey, an exec at Microsoft's Map--Point division. Millions of road-trippers download custom maps from Web ventures like MapQuest and Yahoo Maps. You can now Google things by location: type in a ZIP code and "laser surgery," and you'll find the closest places that can fix your vision. Carmakers offer GPS navigation systems as a built-in option; cell-phone and PDA users can find the nearest lavatory or pool hall; and a mobile application called Dodgeball lets you know if any friends--or friends of your friends--are within 10 blocks.

But just over the azimuth is the holy grail of mapping, where every imaginable form of location-based information is layered onto an aggregate construct that mirrors the whole world. "I call it the Virtual Globe," says Jack Dangermond, founder of Environmental Systems Research Institute (ESRI), a Redlands, Calif., company that pioneered what's known as Geographical Information Systems. "It combines the World Wide Web with geographical information like satellite images, roads, demographic information, sensors... and then you're modeling the planet as a living system."

Dangermond knows this turf well. When he started ESRI in 1969, geography was an uncool academic pursuit, and using computers for mapping was, well, uncharted territory. But at Harvard years before, he had been among the first to experiment in creating virtual maps that "layered" quantitative information from databases onto them. Though sometimes complicated to use, these efforts in "digital geography" were incredibly powerful, and were invaluable to customers in corporations (notably energy companies looking for an edge in exploration) and the government. ERSI's products were used, for instance, to find the best location for a new mining town in Venezuela and the placement of ski runs in Utah. But in the 1990s, Dangermond understood that ERSI's original model of a closed, proprietary system wasn't going to work when geographical information became widely distributed on the Web and routinely integrated into thousands of applications and services. The company spent $340 million to change its system to conform to open standards, to make ESRI's software open to developers who write what Dangermond calls "maps for your apps."

Of course, now that the mapping field is expanding from the traditional players to the mass market, Jack Dangermond's strategy pits him against Bill Gates. Microsoft's MapPoint division has 150 engineers, including many cartographers, creating simple ways for developers to put mapping information into their software applications. And, of course, Microsoft isn't the only competitor: a slew of major tech companies, from IBM to AOL to Oracle, "are all involved in a big way," says David Schell of Open GIS, a nonprofit consortium that promotes open geographical-information standards. "It's now one of the key components of the Net."