MapCreating – Authors of service

About us

Experience

We are university graduates operating as professional cartographers since 1978 and 1987. Wydawnictwo Kartograficzne Polkart was established in 1989, and Kartpol – in 1991. We have developed thousands of tourist maps, city plans, wall-mounted and road maps, many thematic and general atlases, and thousands of maps for school atlases and schoolbooks. We work using the world’s most modern cartographic software. You can take a look at our achievements by visiting Polkart’s website; you can also find opinions about the company there.

Portal and its creators

The MapCreating portal was developed with the efforts of several dozen people from Poland, France, and other European countries. The idea of a portal for generating maps was born in 2018. At that time, we asked ourselves the question: how to make a map automatically? Is it possible? What about data and software available?

Our mission is to make sure that people from worldwide have immediate access to reliable maps. We consider up-to-date and content-rich maps tailored to actual needs in terms of geographic reach, content scope, graphic style, size, and saving format. We believe that maps will improve the quality of people’s lives. Maps make it easier to build local communities and change the world for the better.

Our mission is also to promote good practices in cartography and consolidate the achievements of global cartography by using the best cartographic methods and making methodically correct maps. It is important to us to fill the gap concerning covering the Earth with good maps, i.e. areas for which it is not profitable to publish maps edited manually by traditional cartographic publishers. However, we do not intend to replace them and compete with them.

Our vision focuses on creating an online portal for automatically generating map on demand; engaging the best scientists in the field of cartography and geography in the project; using the best cartographic software in the world and the best, constantly developed and supplemented open spatial database – OpenStreetMap®; creating a portal that relieves the client’s burden involving the process of drawing map, and instead providing the complete, globally unique personalisation.

to Henryk Górski

Michał Siwicki

Hi, I am the person behind the idea of MapCreating and the portal’s primary executor. As a cartographer and a graduate of geography studies, I have been creating maps since 1988. My interests are mountains and history.

Leszek Grzechnik

Hi, I am Leszek Grzechnik. In 1977, I graduated from geographical studies, majoring in cartography, at the Maria Curie-Skłodowska University in Lublin, where I worked for 42 years. I’ve been making maps for 45 years. I am interested in painting and traveling.

Krzysztof Kałamucki

Hi, my name is Krzysztof Kałamucki. I graduated in geography with a major in cartography in 1986. For 35 years, I have been working at the Maria Curie-Skłodowska University in Lublin. I teach students cartography and GIS.

Team:

Cartography and geography

Paweł Cebrykow

Witold Czajka

Bartłomiej Grzechnik

Mirosław Krukowski

Dieudonné Mouketou-Tarazewicz

Tomasz Popławski

Manfred Pustlauck

Artur Sikorski

Wioletta Kałamucka

Computer Science and Geoinformatics

EnviroSolutions – Michał Włoga, Michał Bodura

Instytut Infrastruktury Informacji Przestrzennej – Bartłomiej Bielawski, Andrzej Kwiecień

Lorienne SAS – Jean-Paul Dehette, Jérôme Dietlin, Didier Goldman, Adèle Raby

SoniqSoft – Artur Patała, Mateusz Wojtyński

Szymon Wałach, Wiktor Roś, Franciszek Bednorz, Błażej Nowik

Other

Michał Chyrek

Paulina Kozłowska

S-Print – Krzysztof Nowak

Meritum – Joanna Toruń

Karolina Siwicka

and others

Project financing

Wydawnictwo Kartograficzne Polkart Michał Siwicki is implementing the Innovative technological line for an automatic online map generating project.

Objectives

The strategic objective is to carry out R&D work of creating IT solutions providing 100% automation in generating the highest-quality maps. As part of the strategy, we plan to achieve the following specific objectives:

* Developing and implementing market-innovative IT solutions providing 100% automation in the process of creating and producing maps;

* Expanding the company’s offer with activities in the field of administering a new innovative web portal;

* Ensuring the highest quality of generated maps;

* Adapting to customer needs and developing skills in using IT and telecommunications solutions and modern databases;

* Increasing the company’s competitiveness and building its image as an innovative company in the international market.

Effects

The project assumes creating a new technological process, Automatically generating maps on demand. Currently, maps are made with a computer by an editor, and there is not much automation involved. The result of this completely new technological process will consist in creating an improved product, i.e. a map including new features.

These features will include being the most up-to-date, direct and immediate availability of the map, strict adjustment to a customer’s individual needs, low price in relation to the quality, and worldwide availability. Customers expect cheap maps that are at the same time up-to-date and illustrative, i.e. with the proper appearance, legible and tailored to their needs. The new product will be widely available in geographical terms, also due to the low price and speed of acquisition.

Thus, professional maps will replace free ones everywhere where customers care about quality, adaptation to needs, and not violating map copyrights. Dissemination of good maps will take place.

General data

project NO. – RPLU.01.02.00-06-0017/19;
project value – PLN 2,250,048.79, including a contribution from European Funds – PLN 1,668,925.64 zł;
implementation start: 1 July 2020, end: 30 September 2023.