Glossary
Cartographer Terms & Vocabulary
15 essential cartographer terms with plain-English definitions: the vocabulary you’ll hear in training and on day one.
Key cartographer vocabulary
These 15 terms come up constantly in cartographer training, on the job and in interviews. Knowing them helps you follow instructions, document accurately and sound prepared.
- Basemap
- Background map.
- Coordinate system
- Location reference.
- Geocoding
- Turning addresses into points.
- GIS
- Geographic information system.
- Layer
- Set of map data.
- Lidar
- Laser-based elevation data.
- Metadata
- Data about data.
- Orthophoto
- Corrected aerial image.
- Photogrammetry
- Measuring from photos.
- Projection
- Flattening the earth.
- Raster
- Pixel-based data.
- Remote sensing
- Data from satellites and aircraft.
- Symbology
- How features look.
- Topology
- Spatial relationships.
- Vector
- Points, lines and polygons.
Practice these terms
Test yourself with the free Cartographer practice test: it includes vocabulary questions built from this list. For a complete course, see Cartographer training.
Browse terms from every career in our career glossary.