Hmm, well, Schwarzkreuz, you've thrown up quite a few concepts I've come across as well although I find Baudrillard's cocktail of simulacra unappetizing, the others are pretty much for my par. To Arsheesh's comment on the infinite regress, I think the point Gregory Bateson is making in that passage (good book, the ecology of the mind, by the way - some interesting stuff in there) is that a map is a physical representation of a mental representation. In representing we are never touching upon a merely physical territory, somehow pre-existing. It's as if the difference between a DEM and a map is the idiosyncratic and cultural mess of representations, associations, concepts and ideas that are applied to the map, leading to decisions regarding projection, information depiction, boundaries, names, etc. etc. A computer wouldn't care about how it got the data, it would end up a stream of bits to it and a visual reprsentation of the territory - a map - would make less sense and take more processing power.

Anyway, what I want to get at is something else. I don't think mapping in and of itself, especially the mapping we do, is so much about the representation of territory as about the aesthetic and effective conveyance of mental representation from one mind to another - something like infographics, in a way, but often - in the case of fantasy maps - where infographics try to convey data (and a weltanschaung informing and colouring that data), our maps also try to more explicitly convey mood & mystery. (Gods, that last paragraph is a mess, but ... well, I won't fix it now!)