Visual Exploration of Astronomical Documents

Soizick Lesteven (1) , P. Poinçot (1) , F. Murtagh (2)

1 ObAS - Observatoire astronomique de Strasbourg
2 Royal Holloway University of London - Department of Computer Science

The CDS bibliographical map is a tool for organizing astronomical text documents into a meaningful map for exploration and search. The system is based on the Self Organizing Map (SOM) algorithm that automatically organizes documents into a two-dimensional grid so that related documents appear close to each other and general topics appear in well defined area. After the determination of optimal parameters for the SOM's learning process, we have developed a graphical WWW interface which allows the visualization of the document distribution. It shows the localization of documents related to given topics (keyword queries). The map is clickable and provide links to the documents. Recent developments include detailed map of small areas, full text indexing, automatic labeling, ... Some applications will be presented. One map is available for interactive use on the Web (http://simbad.u-strasbg.fr/A+A/map.pl).

Domaines: Astrophysique [astro-ph]

Soizick Lesteven, P. Poinçot, F. Murtagh. Visual Exploration of Astronomical Documents. Astronomical Data Analysis Software and Systems X, Nov 2000, Boston, United States. pp.78. ⟨insu-02889299⟩