Hy.Doc.: a system to support the study of large document collections

In this paper the authors present a system, named Hy.Doc. (Hypertext Document) that allows users to get hypertext-like access to a document collection through automatically created links between individual paragraphs of the documents. The system can be effectively used in educational settings, to support study activities involving large digital information sources such as the Internet and CD-ROMs. Hy.Doc. is based on a Self Organizing Map, a neural network widely used to organize large amounts of data in clusters ordered in a two dimensional array such as a grid or a map. The prototype of the system has been tested by using the documents taken from the proceedings of the AACE WebNet 96 conference.