WorldMap is a collaboratively edited, multilingual, free internet mapping electronic media site open to everyone that is housed at the Center for Geographic Analysis at Harvard University and accessible at the WorldMap website makes it possible for those who are not experts in GIS and web mapping to explore, visualize, and share their research materials in a GIS spatial framework, enhancing their ability to conduct academic research, community service projects, and instructional activities.

The site was created following the success of the AfricaMap project here, that launched in beta version in November 2009 to bring together a range of cross-disciplinary materials on Africa, within an online mapping environment.

These collaborations include, among others, the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database at Emory University, the UNESCO World Heritage Sites, and social crisis mapping such as Ushahidi.

In other cases, such as the ATLA Religion Database and the Human Relations Area Files at Yale University, associated data were first geo-referenced and then uploaded directly to the AfricaMap website.

The Institute of Advanced Studies at the United Nations University (the research arm of the U. N.) is addressing the illicit trade of flora and fauna in East Africa.

WorldMap is a federated system with collaborations in place already with an array of other universities and institutions and is based on a geospatial infrastructure platform developed by the Center for Geographic Analysis.

The underlying platform, called MapD, works by parallelizing processes across commodity GPU cards, achieving speedups over traditional databases by a factor of a million using inexpensive hardware.

WorldMap has its origins in AfricaMap,[9][10] a website begun in 2007 by art historian Suzanne Blier and GIS scientist Ben Lewis with Harvard University Provost funds in Innovative Computing and was designed and built in 2008 and 2009 by Ben Lewis of Harvard and Robert Cheetham of Azavia, with input from Blier and Sinologist Peter Bol, the Director of the Center for Geographic Analysis, to make a broad range of materials on Africa available within an online mapping environment.

[11] Lewis, who built the first peer-to-peer GIS system ROMap in 2001,[12] had recently established the Geonomy Project[13] with Scott Melby, from which AfricaMap's innovative technical features were based in part.

To meet the needs of these diverse new projects, and to add new capabilities, the decision was made to build a more general system that anyone in the world could use to create their own custom mapping applications and load their own data.

Some of this is encouraged, as for example the inclusion of ethnicity maps that are known to have biases and inaccuracies based in part on the fact that people's identities are complex and constantly shifting, rarely conforming to precisely configured spaces.