ABSTRACT
In spite of being impacted by information technology, hardcopy maps are still very popular in coal mining community. Based on a research project on coal mining cartography in Yanzhou Coal Group Company of Shandong province, China, merits and demerits of traditional coal mining cartography are analyzed systematically, and a new approach is proposed in this paper under a full consideration of the complexity of paper maps used in coal mines. For the purposes of communication it is inadequate to represent a map whose content is just an imitation to the spatial objects, such as geological borders, faults, contours, and so on. More important to coal mining cartography is the ability to offer sharable information behind the maps, when necessary, even through Internet. Key technology of the new approach to coal mining cartography lies in the standardization. In a sense map making is just one of the output forms of a shared information system.
