A. Berlyant. FIVE HUNDRED YEARS OF THE DEVELOPMENT OF CARTOGRAPHY AND ITS CONTEMPORARY PROSPECTS

In 2012 cartographers of the world celebrated the 500th anniversary of the birth of Gerard Mercator, whose legacy is of great importance for modern science. The ideas of the great cartographer received today a second wind. His equal-angle cylindrical projection is a required mathematical basis of all navigational maps. Globes, which time seemed to have passed long ago, became a basis of global information and mapping systems. Atlases, these global and national cartographic encyclopedia, are a good example of a scientific inheritance, they still rely on system principles of the cartography of Mercator. Maps creation and application, to what Mercator devoted much attention, became the single method of GIS mapping. At the present level of development of science and technology an adverse factor for the cartography became the weakening of its traditional coopera- tion with scientific geography, concentration on the issues of GIS and GPS. Today cartography faces two challenges: 1. Cre- ation of the detailed thematic Google images; 2. Creation mathematical and planetary mapping models. Cartographers should rely not only on the data of remote sensing, GPS multi-scale and multi-generalized modeling, but also on close cooperation with geography. In the year of fifth hundredth anniversary of Mercator it should be noted that the progress in cartography is not in the denial of past achievements, but in their development based on new techniques and technologies.