ABSTRACT
As demonstrated in Section 3.3, there is a need to know more about who is using which web maps for what purpose. This need is becoming more and more pressing as the population of users as well as the map use goals are diverging rapidly nowadays. Three years ago we also did not know much about the use and users of web maps. However, we did know that the group of people who actually made use of the Internet was not very diverse at that time. Therefore, three years ago it was possible to state (van Elzakker & Koussoulakou, 1997) that the group of users of maps on the WWW could be defined pretty well: relatively young (15 to 40 years of age) males in Western countries with a high level of education, with an interest in science, technology and/or computers and in the possession of a PC. Also in view of the specific characteristics of the WWW medium, they were sometimes considered as a completely new generation of map users who were and are interacting with map displays in entirely different ways than “traditional” map users. But still, because of the rather limited group of people actually connected to the Internet, it was not so difficult in theory to identify web map purposes and to adjust the cartographic web tools to the needs and characteristics of its potential users.
