Mapping

Here, a term of art: the gathering and collating of a set of data about something real — and the map is the data, not the picture drawn from it.

The canon uses mapping in a narrower sense than ordinary speech, and says so explicitly. To map is to collect and collate a set of data — for instance the projects that exist, with some information about each, including who is taking part. The collected data is the map. From it, many views can be generated: tables, network diagrams, geographic positions. Ordinary usage calls the picture the map; here the picture is a visualization, and the map is the structure underneath (Data · Register · The Record · The three charts).

The distinction is not pedantry, and the reason is given on the page. This body's whole aim is Interoperability among a growing diversity of expressions — many cultures, many languages, many purposes, many surfaces. That is only possible if the underlying data model is held with care and kept separate from any one rendering of it, so the same map can be brought to light in many different ways without any of them owning it (Minimum standards of interoperability · The interoperability test · On translating · Screens and paper · The Deck Standard).

Two disciplines travel with it. The map is kept where the visualizations cannot corrupt it — a view is generated from the map and never edited in place of it, or the body ends up with several maps that disagree (One canonical home per concept · The Record as the Movement's variance gauge). And a map is made of something real and stays answerable to it — a register of projects that nobody keeps current is worse than none, because it is believed (Truth · Measurement · Honesty about time).

Beneath the technical sense stands the older one the canon assumes everywhere else: a map is a rendering of a territory and is never the territory, so every map is partial, instrument-shaped and correctable (Perception · Mind · Current Best Understanding · We Do Not Know).

Also called: collecting and collating Stands on: Data · Interoperability · Perception Opens onto: Register · The Record · Minimum standards of interoperability · The three charts · Navigation · Value Stream Mapping · The Deck Standard · Sensemaking In play: the Workshop and the Room — whenever a body starts keeping a list of something and has to decide what the list actually is Sources: Mapping (root page, stub — the data-plus-visualization definition, its own contrast with ordinary usage, and the interoperability argument) · Map of Reality, Maps of Content (root pages) · lionsberg.wiki: Mapping Open: The canon's Mapping is this narrow data sense, while Map of Reality carries the map-and-territory sense and nothing relates them; a reader following a link to mapping may land on either meaning. · The sweep that proposed this row read Mapping as the act of making a map distinct from map and territory; the root page does not say that, and this page follows the page.