Is GIS hidebound by the legacy of cartography?

Geographic Information Systems in their present form owe much to a legacy from cartography. Cartography has provided both a pioneering application for the domain, as well as the established archive of paper maps which have been turned into data on the digitising table. The conceptual basis of the map, specifically the Boolean map, has also become fundamental to GIS. To better serve the many users, however, I argue here that GIS must move away from this model for data creation, storage and presentation, and as a result the relation between GIS and a cartography must change. Although cartography has undoubtedly provided an impetus to GIS initiatives, GIS must change to support real geographical information as it is recorded by domain scientists, and software tools need to be developed to transform that data into intelligible views and exploratory tools. This can be done with current GIS, but it must be made much easier. With this change the need for cartographic design skills among GIS users will increase rather than decrease. To ensure that geographic information will be intelligible to the investigator and the user 'good' design will be paramount, and is currently noticeable by its absence in system defaults available within GIS.