Self-organizing map browser for database retrieval
Antti Kerminen, Antti Raike, Mauri Kaipainen · 2000
We introduce a web tool to access database information by clicking and dragging on similarity-clustered item labels on a two-dimensional map visualization of a multidimensional data corpus, formed using the self-organizing map (SOM) algorithm. Usability problem with one-dimensionally displayed information Traditional presentations of data, such as retrieved from databases or internet typically force the user to view data ordered by one dimension, such as date of creation or alphabets, or as hierarchical embedding of items, such as the system of folders on computer desktop. From the users' viewpoint, such presentations require a level of academic skills to be grasped, due to poor match with user's cognitive map. This may be because they call for attention on one dimension at a time. Such presentations fail to optimize viewing information in which significant patterns correspond to holistic matches satisfying multiple criteria. As an example from human life, for most people in search for the only one it is not sufficient to rank the candidates solely by beauty, or by richness. Instead, the natural way is to search for holistic co-occurrence of beauty, richness, wisdom and generosity, beside other desired virtues. Other examples of such match include surveys that result in collections of qualitative judgments of relevance or importance of given properties, or degrees of category membership, as well as hard technological control tasks with multiple indicators of system-state to be simultaneously monitored, such as airplane cockpits. The cognitive load in such multi-criteria match tasks can be reduced by presenting the user with results that are pre-clustered by multiple criteria. From the point of view of matching users’ cognitive capabilities, it may not be irrelevant that perceptual or behavioral patterns are known to be responded to by fields of neural activity on the cortex, with a point of maximum and graded degrees of activity distributed widely around them. Relatively similar activity fields correspond to relativ ely similar patterns. Tonotopies (Hood 1977), somatotopies (Merzenich 1988; Wall 1988) and spatial representations (Olton 1977) are