Seeing is Believing: Candidate Web Sources for Information Visualization

[Gerry McKiernan]

                Seeing is Believing:
Candidate Web Sources for Information Visualization

    In response to my recent posting on The End of the World
(Wide Web) As We Know It, several individuals asked how the
vision I presented could be realized. There are a number
of several very good Web collections that could serve as
testbeds for this idea.

    Certainly, any Yahoo subcategory would be appropriate.
Xia Lin at the University of Kentucky at Lexington has made
an excellent contribution with his new SiteMap project at:

    http://lislin.gws.uky.edu/Sitemap/Sitemap.html

    It makes use the self-organzing semantic/feature maps
of a neural network technique using the Kohonen algorithm.

There is of course, Chen's work at the University of Arizona
that has been developed in conjunction with the University of
Illinois Digital Library Initiative that also applied the
Kohonen SOM.  For details see my Project Aristotle(sm) at:

  http://www.public.iastate.edu/~CYBERSTACKS/Aristotle.htm

  In addition to these current application, one could
imagine the use of the Kohonen SOM, or any of the information
technologies I've outlined in my project description

The Big Picture(sm): Visual Browsing in Web and non-Web Databases
at URL: http://www.public.iastate.edu.edu/~CYBERSTACKS/BigPic.htm

to the NetFirst database, or to the OCLC database of MARC records,
or for that matter to any MARC database (or structured) database
to create a visual representation of the contents/concepts
presented in these records.

   Likewise, one could imagine doing the same for the
works of Aristotle that are available in full-text on the
Web to offer users to search a text or the entire corpus by
browsing a figurative (or literal) landscape of concepts
found therein.

   While I believe that we soon will be able to visually browse the
entire World Wide Web, we need not wait until the technology
or the bandwidth necessary for this level of access be developed. We
can begin development now with the resources such as those noted
using current Information Visualization technologies.

   [With appropriate funding, it's my plan to apply the SOM
technique to the entire CyberStacks(sm) collection as an
alternative mode of access.]

    As always, any suggestions, reactions, critiques or support
for these and other wild ideas, are much appreciated.

    Regards,

Gerry McKiernan
Curator, CyberStacks(sm)
Iowa State University
Ames IA 50011

gerrymck at iastate.edu
http://www.public.iastate.edu/~CYBERSTACKS/

                "Don't You See It?"