Disease maps encode knowledge about molecular pathophysiology in both visual and computational format, helping interdisciplinary exchange between bench scientists, clinical researchers and bioinformaticians. In this talk I’ll introduce the concept based on the example of Parkinson’s disease map and demonstrate it as a tool for visual exploration, analytics and investigating complex data. Then, I’ll describe the evolution of the approach and how it was picked up by a broader research community leading to a large-scale effort to build the COVID-19 Disease Map.