Browsing digital libraries with the aid of self-organizing maps

-Powerful methods for exploring and searching collections of free-form textual documents are needed to control the flood of digital information emerging from various sources. In this article we present a method, WEBSOM, for automatic organization of document collections based on full-text analysis using the Self-Organizing Map. The document collection is ordered on the map in such a way that similar documents lie near each other. The WWW-based user interface provides the basic functionalities necessary for intuitive exploration of the document space visualized with a map: moving on the map, zooming, and examining individual documents. We apply the method to the Usenet newsgroup comp.ai.neural-nets.