Multi-dimensional Indexing

[Gerry Mckiernan]

      In response to my recent  posting concerning  the use of 'Multi-Dimensional Indexing' in e-Books or e-Journals 

[  http://sunsite.berkeley.edu/Web4Lib/archive/0101/0180.html ] , 

Peter B. Boyce,  Senior Consultant for Electronic Publishing for the American Astronomical Society (AAS) sent the response below [Re-posted with permission]

   He sites/cites a most impressive application of the Kohonen
self-organizing  maps for an index to the _Astrophysical Journal_
If there is one special Web site you visit today, I strongly recommend that you visit and explore this most remarkable Multi-Dimensional Index'

/Gerry McKiernan
Self-Organized Librarian 
Iowa State University
Ames IA 50011

gerrymck at iastate.edu 

P.S. I have been a Big Fan of the Kohonen SOM for several years.
For other examples, please see  _The Big Picture(sm)_
[ http://www.public.iastate.edu/~CYBERSTACKS/BigPic.htm] 
my clearinghouse devoted to "Visual Browsing in Web and non-Web Databases", notable the two examples under Helsinki University of Technology, the home of Teuvo Kohonen, the developer of the SOM 


>>> "Peter B. Boyce" <pboyce at aas.org> 01/18/01 02:34PM >>>
Gerry,

The Centre de Donnees Astronomique de Strasbourg 
(http://cdsweb.u-strasbg.fr/) utilizes the technique of "Self-organizing 
maps" to collect articles under various concept headings and arranging 
those headings such that adjacent concepts are closely related to each 
other. The entire collection is then displayed as a three dimensional 
map.  See http://simbad.u-strasbg.fr/ApJ/map.pl for an example of how this 
works.

This provides a visual method of navigating among concepts and discovering 
related articles in a visual way which is much more intuitive to me than 
text-based searches -- even when they are incorporated into a "concept map" 
of the type described by Ross.

They use a neural network method which includes all the article keywords to 
characterize each article. The article keywords -- never less than three 
per article -- are assigned by the editor and the vocabulary is controlled, 
so this method is quite reliable. Unfortunately, this neural network 
approach uses a lot of computing power, and it is not suitable for "on the 
fly" usage.  But, it demonstrates the kind of approach which will have to 
be done eventually so that readers can find relevant information more 
reliably than at present.

Cheers,
--Peter--


_________________________________________________________
Peter B. Boyce    -   Senior Consultant for Electronic Publishing, AAS
email: pboyce at aas.org 
Summer address:                                Winter: 4109 Emery Place,
33 York St., Nantucket, MA 02554        Washington, DC 20016
Phone:  508-228-9062                           202-244-2473
_________________________________________________________