【正文】
tronic publication, which has many mon characters with ordinary CDROM publications, such as their multimedia functions. For the deeper exploration of electronic atlas it is very important to understand the internal and general structure of the new media structure. The aim of this paper is to discuss the internal structure of multimedia electronic atlas as a whole by applying the methodology of linguistics.In the first section the authors introduces some basic concepts of hypertext, hypermedia and multimedia electronic atlas. As the main character of electronic atlas distinct from other hypermedia product, map is the primary information type, which is as important as text, picture, sound and animation.In the second section, the linguistic mechanism of hypermedia structure is systematically described at the two levels of function and form. It is stated that hypermedia has twolevel analogy with writing language. That is, hypermedia structure is a kind of enhanced information carrier, which is the same as writing language in function, and as for the formal analogy, hypermedia structure can also divided into different language units with syntax and semantics defined on them.Linguistic methodology can be applied to the research the new media.In the third section, the linguistic mechanism of multimedia electronic atlas, as an example of hypermedia structure, is described in more detailed way. Here node is discussed as the language unit. A syntaxoriented division of node into smaller language units in hypermedia structure is given and the chunking operation is defined upon the different type of units as the internal generation mechanism of node. Another operations special for hypermedia, bination and linkage are again defined within and between page(s) respectively, a concept of more plicated language unit. The operations constitute the main body of syntax and semantics mechanism of electronic atlas. In the last section, a case study is given by introducing an electronic atlas authoring system developed by the authors. The system has been designed following the guidelines described in this paper. The authors conclude that the exploration and understanding of internal structure of multimedia electronic atlas can be very helpful to the improvement of the design of an authoring software system as well as electronic atlas itself. Linguistic methodology provides us a very promising conceptual tool to explore and understand it. Syntax aspect can help us design better authoring software to meet the need of appearance and framework of electronic atlas, and the possibility of linking and chunking different units together, while semantics aspect can help us design better contents of electronic atlas to convey information more efficiently. Key words Linguistic mechanism, Hypermedia structure, Multimedia electronic atlas10 / 10