自然界存在湍流和生物体等各种复杂系统.限于研究方法和技术，研究者对复杂系统的多尺度和非线性行为等挑战性问题缺乏深入理解.结构定量表征作为发展研究新方法的重要方向之一，可以理解为经典几何描述从简单到复杂系统的推广.本文阐述新方法的目标和思路；根据已有研究成果，对结构定义方法及其要素提出启发性建议.

There are various complex systems in nature, for instance turbulence and organism. In the present stage, the lack of effective methodologies and ideas hinders the further understanding of these challenging problems, e.g., the multi-scale and nonlinear behaviors of complex systems. As a promising direction to develop novel analyses approaches, the structure characterization can be regarded as a reasonable extension of the classical geometry analysis from simple to complex systems. In this paper, the general goals and ideas of the approaches to be developed were expounded. Moreover, based on the achieved results, some tentative guidelines and prerequisites were suggested for structure characterization.