Re: Multi-dimensional Indexing Gerry Mckiernan 19 Jan 2001 17:37 UTC
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@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@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@aas.org Summer address: Winter: 4109 Emery Place, 33 York St., Nantucket, MA 02554 Washington, DC 20016 Phone: 508-228-9062 202-244-2473 _________________________________________________________