Quantitative measures for spatial information of maps

The map is a medium for recording geographical information. The information contents of a map are of interest to spatial information scientists. In this paper, existing quantitative measures for map information are evaluated. It is pointed out that these are only measures for statistical information and some sort of topological information. However, these measures have not taken into consideration the spaces occupied by map symbols and the spatial distribution of these symbols. As a result, a set of new quantitative measures is proposed, for metric information, topological information and thematic information. An experimental evaluation is also conducted. Results show that the metric information is more meaningful than statistical information, and the new index for topological information is more meaningful than the existing one. It is also found that the new measure for thematic information is useful in practice.