Very Large Two-Level SOM for the Browsing of Newsgroups

On January 19, 1996 we published in the Internet a demo of how to use Self-Organizing Maps (SOMs) for the organization of large collections of full-text files. Later we added other newsgroups to the demo. It can be found at the address http://websom.hut.fi/websom/. In the present paper we describe the main features of this system, called the WEBSOM, as well as some newer developments of it.