Its not just a matter of mapping, no, but imo its a critical first step. You need a model of space-time. You need to be able to place all the facts into a spatial world following the physical laws.
Take this problem, and assume you dont know a single thing about battles/military history, etc.
There are two groups of men standing few hundred feet apart. It is raining, the ground is muddy. One group of men has these wooden curved sticks with a string and iron with pointy ends. The other group has people on horses, and men with very long pointy iron sticks and theyre all covered in steel plating.
Who will win if they all fight against each other? There's really no correct answer but Id expect an intelligent agent to give some detailed reasoning for their decision and to infer details or possibilities and ask questions based again not on previous knowledge but what physically makes sense in the description that was given.
This isnt just a matter of statistics or knowing facts like "rain, mud = heavy armored units will be slower or even trapped", "horses are fast", "bows can penetrate steel", etc. If I give you the full detailed description of the battlefield, very small details can completely change your perception. For example if I said theres big giant logs in the middle of battle, you need to reason about how horses jump, and whether it's something they can clear. You can do this barely knowing horses if you understand how animals in general move. Perhaps there is even some small difference in horses that would make you think they are capable of making large jumps whereas all the animals youve seen before cannot
What Im saying is, to truly reason you need to understand spatial relations very deeply. Indeed id say spatial relations (through time) are all there is to reason about.