Sketch maps are an externalization of an individual’s mental images of an environment. The information represented in sketch maps is schematized, distorted, generalized, and thus processing spatial information in sketch maps requires plausible representations based on human cognition. Typically only qualitative relations between spatial objects are preserved in sketch maps, and therefore proces...

We outline the main elements of what we call polyscopic structuring of information and argue that information needs to be structured accordingly. The principles of polyscopy may both serve as guidelines for creating Topic Maps, and provide orientation for further development of Topic Maps standards and software.

vi CHAPTER 1. OVERVIEW 1

Topic Maps are means for representing sophisticated, conceptual indexes of any information collection for the purpose of semantic information integration. To properly fulfil this purpose, the generation of Topic Maps has to base on a solid theory. This paper proposes the Observation Principle as the theoretical fundament of a future scientific discipline Topic Maps Engineering. SemanticTalk gen...

In dieser Untersuchung werden die drei Lokalen Suchmaschinen Google Maps, Bing Maps und TOnline Maps in einem kombinierten Eye-Trackingund Usability-Test verglichen. Es zeigen sich sowohl Probleme bei der Benutzung einzelner Suchmaschinen als auch übergreifende Ergebnisse, die für die Gestaltung von kartenbasierten Suchmaschinen relevant sind. Wir geben Empfehlungen für die Gestaltung solcher S...

We present two separate algorithms for unsupervised multimodal processing. Our first proposal, the singlepass Hebbian linked self-organising map network, significantly reduces the training of Hebbian-linked selforganising maps by computing in a single epoch the weights of the links associating the separate modal maps. Our second proposal, based on the counterpropagation network algorithm, imple...

Recently, there has been a considerable research activity in extending topographic maps of vectorial data to more general data structures, such as sequences or trees. However, the representational capabilities and internal representations of the models are not well understood. We rigorously analyze a generalization of the Self-Organizing Map (SOM) for processing sequential data, Recursive SOM (...

Both Topic Maps and RDF are popular semantic web standards designed for machine processing of web documents. Since these representations were originally created for different purposes, they have differences both in their concepts and in their data models. The Topic Map data model can be seen as an ontology for building indices over web documents, whereas RDF is a language to define arbitrary pr...