Overview
Contact maps provide a more reduced representation of a protein structure than its full 3D atomic coordinates. The advantage is that contact maps are invariant to rotations and translations. They are more easily predicted by machine learning methods. It has also been shown that under certain circumstances it is possible to reconstruct the 3D coordinates of a protein using its contact map.
Contact maps are also used for protein superimposition and to describe similarity between protein structures. They are either predicted from protein sequence or calculated from a given structure.
Read more about this topic: Protein Contact Map