Map labeling is of fundamental importance in both Cartography and Geographical Information Systems (G.I.S.) and is one of the areas targeted for research by the ACM Computational Geometry Impact Task Force.

It has been studied both by the cartographic as well as the computer science communities. It attracts many researchers due to its numerous applications. Although much research on this problem has been done, it is interesting to note that map-labelling processes in commercial fields are very often executed manually or with little support of automatic tools.