Get Started with Mapping Toolbox

Mapping Toolbox™ provides algorithms and functions for transforming geographic data and creating map displays. You can visualize your data in a geographic context, build map displays from more than 60 map projections, and transform data from a variety of sources into a consistent geographic coordinate system.

Mapping Toolbox supports a complete workflow for managing geographic data. You can import vector and raster data from a wide range of file formats and web map servers. The toolbox lets you process and customize data using trimming, interpolation, resampling, coordinate transformations, and other techniques. Data can be combined with base map layers from multiple sources in a single map display. You can export data in file formats such as shapefile, GeoTIFF, and KML.

Geospatial data can be complex and difficult to process.

A map is a representation of geographic data. Map data represents a set of geographic locations or properties.

Geospatial data represents positions on the surface of a planet through ordered coordinate pairs or in matrix format.

Vector geodata consists of sequentially ordered pairs of geographic (latitude, longitude) or projected (x,y) coordinate pairs.

Raster geodata represents map data in matrix format.

Latitude and longitude specify the position of a point on the surface of a planet. They are defined as angles between the point, the equator, and the axis of rotation.

You can model the Earth using a perfect sphere, an ellipsoid, an oblate spheroid, or a geoid.

A map projection transforms a curved surface such as the Earth onto a two-dimensional plane. All map projections introduce distortions compared to maps on globes.