• 1 Laboratoire Bordelais de Recherche en Informatique

We consider the usual model of hypermaps or, equivalently, bipartite maps, represented by pairs of permutations that act transitively on a set of edges E. The specific feature of our construction is the fact that the elements of E are themselves (or are labelled by) rather complicated combinatorial objects, namely, the 4-constellations, while the permutations defining the hypermap originate from an action of the Hurwitz braid group on these 4-constellations.The motivation for the whole construction is the combinatorial representation of the parameter space of the ramified coverings of the Riemann sphere having four ramification points.