Research on Formal Theory Framework of Navigation Digital Map

With the development of the navigation industry, navigation digital map plays an increasingly important role. Navigation digital map differs from traditional maps in the purpose, usage and interaction. It lacks of theoretical foundation for map-manufacture and applications. In this paper, we review the history of cartography theory and illustrate the distinct features of navigation digital map. From the perspective of full information theory, a formal theory framework of navigation digital map is proposed. Concepts and characters of syntactic map, semantic map and pragmatic map are proposed and the differences of those maps are also discussed. From map-manufacture point of view, we introduce the symbolization, semantic and pragmatic phases and present restricts in those phases. An integrated map-manufacture process is also proposed. From map application point of view, the interactions among human, agent and map are discussed.