Geographic Information Systems (GIS) help addressing geographical and environmental issues by providing information about a region or a city as a set of maps (layers), each one displaying information about a given theme like roads, vegetation, tourist spots or museums for instance. By combining different layers on a region, one can associate a given area to characteristics from their related themes. Indeed, the information from two or more layers might be merged and then transformed into a new layer as defined in map "algebra". When a theme vocabulary is organized as a taxonomy with concepts linked by is-a relationships, there are different ways to annotate an area with a concept depending on the level selected into the layer taxonomy. In this paper, we present an heuristic- based approach for an optimal merging of such layers in a GIS. Our goal is to generate new layers which sum up information from several themes in a most useful way. Two optimization criteria are considered, the average size of resulting areas and the average informative value of their resulting annotation. We demonstrate the validity of the proposed solution, firstly, on a formal example, and then, on a real world application.