The focus of this article is to develop a map display for to stack in the dark, without knowing what stacks that information retrieval. Through an examination of relawe have walked through. We can get a few books each tionships among visual displays, information retrieval, time and walk out of the library to see if the book we and browsing, advantages of visual displays for informaare searching for is among them. If not, we have to walk tion retrieval are characterized as (1) the ability to conin again, based on our knowledge and our previous experivey a large amount of information in a limited space, (2) the potential to reveal semantic relationships of terms ence, to a location where we hope the book would be. In and documents, and (3) the facilitation of browsing and this situation, success in finding a book greatly depends perceptual inferences on retrieval interfaces. These adon whether we can walk to the right place in the dark (to vantages are further demonstrated through a map disgenerate a good query), and whether we know how to play generated by a neural network's self-organizing aladjust our locations until we get to the right place (to gorithm. The map display detects complex relationships among given documents, and reveals the relationships modify queries interactively).
through a spatial arrangement of terms abstracted from
Can we turn on the light for such a library? Can we the documents. The map display also provides interdevelop some visible cues in our retrieval systems so that active tools to allow the user to interact with the underlywe can use our perception for information seeking in ing information. Examples of the map displays show that the digital environment? Answers to these questions may such map displays can be used both as an overview tool and an access or exploration tool, and the map displays reside in the recent advance of information technology.
will likely increase the amount of information that the ''Information processing has been evolving from numeriuser is willing to browse. cal computation to character handling, and now to visual information processing'' (Kunii, 1989). As a result, visualization will become ''the second computer revolution''