[WEB4LIB] Visual site maps

[Anderson, Steven P.]

Not to my knowledge, but Cartia's Themescape arguably comes closest to what
we may want to see (http://www.cartia.com).  I'm fascinated by the whole
visualization of information movement--a must, I think, as we get
increasingly swamped with information.

Steve

Steven Anderson, JD, MA(LS)
Librarian
Gordon Feinblatt Rothman Hoffberger & Hollander, LLC
233 East Redwood Street
Baltimore, MD 21202
Phone: 410.576.4255
Fax: 410.576.4246
E-Mail: sanderson at gfrlaw.com
Web: http://www.gfrlaw.com 

-----Original Message-----
From: ernest perez [mailto:perez at opac.osl.state.or.us]
Sent: Wednesday, June 02, 1999 1:12 PM
To: Multiple recipients of list
Subject: [WEB4LIB] Visual site maps


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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