Digital Earth and Evolution of Cartography

Digital Earth is widely recognized as a new geospatial approach. However, there is no consensus about what exactly caused a new quality of the Digital Earth – the cutting-edge technologies, social practices or new scientific principle. In addition, relationship between Digital Earth and Cartography remains unclear. We propose to use the situational awareness as a platform for comparative analysis of different geospatial products and recovery of the internal logic of the evolution of the cartographic method. We demonstrate that Digital Earth is characterized by the use of another mathematical apparatus, rather than the classic cartography (similarity instead of the projection), and we offer our vision of the evolution of cartography, which led to the developing of Digital Earth.