Spatial Visualisation of Document Similarity
Sorting through a large set of documents when only some are relevant to the topic at hand is a central problem facing analysts. Graphical depiction of the document set has the potential to be a powerful tool, by providing insight into the documents at a glance. The strength of such document visualisations is the possibility of quickly imparting large amounts of information to the human operator. Correspondingly, however, reliance on visual inspection requires that visualisations be guided by an understanding of human perception and cognition (Lee and Vickers 1998). This paper presents preliminary work on employing spatial visualisations of document similarity employing both the well-established multidimensional scaling (MDS) technique and a recently developed approach known as Isomap.