Visual site maps

[ernest perez]

A bit more on visual metaphors for information retrieval:

<http://lislin.gws.uky.edu/Sitemap/Sitemap.html> - an experimental system at U. of KY
<http://websom.hut.fi/websom/> - WEBSOM (Web Self-Organizing-Map) from Kohonnen in Finland. His system uses neural network automatic learning to analyze language content and spatially place documents.

Admittedly a young and clumsy technology, this does seem me to to be going in a worthwhile direction. After all, a classification system is a mental "map of knowledge," this just turns natural language content, in this case, into a 2-dimensional representation. 

This also seems to me like Vannevar Bush's Memex, sort of a map of how things relate to everything else. Good for when you're still a bit fuzzy and just want to browse. Like in the stacks.

It'd be interesting to simultaneously use this approach and also be able to use fielded search filtering....

I'm curious, are there any "production" implementations of this approach in libraries?

Cheers,
-ernest

Ernest Perez, Ph.D./Oregon State Library/perez at opac.state.or.us/503-378-4243
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