Off-Site Insight by First Base Solutions

Standardized and simplified spatial references EPSG stands for European Petroleum Survey Group. They publish a database of coordinate system information. The EPSG number is a 4 to 6 digit number that represents the parameters of a coordinate reference system. EPSG numbers are embedded in georeferenced files, and assigned by the user to mapping projects that can display those files.

More Than Just Mercator You may have noticed that most popular online mapping sites use Mercator projections, which distort the shape of large, northern countries, like Canada, and makes it difficult to accurately interpret relative distance as the latitude increases. Mercator is a cylindrical projection, that shows polar countries at an exaggerated size compared to equatorial countries at small scales. Notice on most online maps how Greenland is the same size as South America, where in reality, the area of South America is more than 8 times that of Greenland!