Cartography as a discipline has a significant stake in the evolving role of maps within systems for scientific visualization, within spatial decision… - Alan MacEachren

Maps, due to their melding of scientific and artistic approaches, always involve complex interaction between the denotative and the connotative meanings of signs they contain.

Treating cartography as a formal communication system implies that we can improve map communication if we can reduce the filtering or loss of information at various points in the system where in the system should have a positive effect, and an information loss should be impossible to overcome. Most efforts to study cartographic communication have been directed to the middle stages in the system: the cartographer's transformation of selected information into the map and the initial extraction of information from the map by the user.

The nature of maps and of their use in science and society is in the midst of remarkable change - change that is stimulated by a combination of new scientific and societal needs for geo-referenced information and rapidly evolving technologies that can provide that information in innovative ways. A key issue at the heart of this change is the concept of "visualization."