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Odds are you've never heard of Virender Ajmani.

But there is a good chance you've used one of his maps.

By day, Mr. Ajmani is a soft-spoken software developer living a quiet life with his wife and two kids in Detroit.

By night, he is one of the world's most prolific and influential map-makers, churning out geographic guides to the American election, state-by-state health insurance stats or the United States' hardest-drinking cities.

"It's an addiction now," he said. "I don't go out much any more."

Much of the story of map-making over the past five years centres on the rise of amateurs such as Mr. Ajmani. Using powerful online mapping tools, they are redefining the millenniums-old field of cartography, earning both critics and admirers in the process.

Their products are not maps in the traditional sense, but mash-ups, which combine traditional charts - hosted by mammoth tech companies such as Google and Microsoft - with some unusual spatial data: UFO sightings, public toilet locations or the whereabouts of England's worst potholes, to name a few.

"We call it the democratization of spatial data," said Sally Hermansen, senior instructor in the University of British Columbia's department of geography. "They are redefining how we think about the world, how we organize the world."

In the three years since developer Paul Rademacher created the first mash-up, a merger of Google Maps and Craigslist house listings, amateur map-makers have posted 150,000 such maps online.

Entire cities have embraced the concept as well.

Bureaucrats and map enthusiasts in Nanaimo, B.C., have uploaded so much data to earth.nanaimo.ca that the coastal city is widely considered the capital of Google Earth.

Real cartographers already have a term for this profusion of online mapping: the geoweb.

Like Mr. Ajmani, most of the authors of this mapping boom are hobbyists, working nights and weekends to plot arcane knowledge.

One Newmarket, Ont., engineer generated a map of places to cut your own Christmas tree in the Toronto area and another of Ontario wineries.

A German man working in Windsor, Ont., created a mash-up of attractions in Regensburg, Germany, to convince his Canadian girlfriend she should move there with him.

"It just took a couple of evenings of coding and hacking to put it together," said Matthias Krueger of Regensburg, where he and that Canadian girlfriend - now his wife - recently had a child. "She loved it. I managed to convince her that Regensburg was not the end of the world."

By his own estimate, Mr. Ajmani has created more than 200 mash-ups, and speaks of his craft like a reclusive artist. "I want very badly to communicate with people," he said, "but I'm not very good at it. The maps are how I speak to the world."

Several years ago, such map-making powers were limited to relatively few cartographers and geographers with years of training.

"Map-making used to be a real top-down process," said Jeremy Crampton, associate professor in the department of geosciences at Georgia State University. "Now, anybody in their spare time can contemplate making a simple map."

This amateurization has been hard to take for many among the map-making establishment. In August, the head of the British Cartographic Society lambasted the widespread migration to online maps, saying they offer a featureless picture of English geography.

"We're in real danger of losing what makes maps so unique - giving us a feel for a place even if we've never been there," Mary Spence told the Royal Geographical Society (with the Institute of British Geographers) conference in London.

According to Dr. Crampton, the rift is not unlike that dividing professional and citizen journalists - bloggers, vloggers and other online commentators who are altering journalism's landscape. While these online amateurs attract wider and wider audiences, professional scribes grumble that they're eroding journalistic principles.

In the U.S., the professional map-makers are pushing for a national certification effort that will more clearly delineate novice from expert. "They're circling the wagons," said Dr. Crampton.

More than that, however, veteran mappers simply miss the look and feel of a professionally produced paper map. With online maps, "you lose that tactile relationship," said Will van den Hoonaard, the Canadian Cartographic Association's history expert.

"All the letters are the same, all the numbers are the same, all the maps are the same."