New methods that are user-friendly and efficient are needed for guidance am
ong the masses of textual information available in the Internet and the Wor
ld Wide Web. We have developed a method and a tool called the WEBSOM which
utilizes the self-organizing map algorithm (SOM) for organizing large colle
ctions of text documents onto visual document maps. The approach to process
ing text is statistically oriented, computationally feasible, and scalable
- over a million text documents have been ordered on a single map. In the a
rticle we consider different kinds of information needs and tasks regarding
organizing, visualizing, searching, categorizing and filtering textual dat
a. Furthermore, we discuss and illustrate with examples how document maps c
an aid in these situations. An example is presented where a document map is
utilized as a tool for visualizing and filtering a stream of incoming elec
tronic mail messages.