Although a manifold resembles Euclidean space near each point, globally it may not. For example, the surface of the sphere is not a Euclidean space, but in a region it can be charted by means of map projections of the region into the Euclidean plane (in the context of manifolds they are called charts). When a region appears in two neighbouring charts, the two representations do not coincide exactly and a transformation is needed to pass from one to the other, called a transition map.