The Sentient Map is a novel visual user interface that combines the strong features of the map, the browser, and the index, based upon the concept of visual languages and active index. Each sentient map has a type, a personality, a visual appearance, and a set of teleactivities. The sentient map's personality consists of: (a) creator's purpose for this map type, and (b) viewer's purpose for this map type. The external appearance of teleaction objects is defined using visual grammars or multidimensional grammars. The teleaction objects are overlaid on some background.

A sentient map can be defined recursively, as (a) a collection of teleaction objects including a background object, or (b) a composition of several sentient maps.