4 User interface to the maps

The HTML language allows an interface to be created which allows access to maps and their assigned documents, and in particular allows use of interactive or ``clickable'' images. At the start of his/her query, the user finds a principal bibliographic map, which is a density map corresponding to a principal Kohonen map. Aided by information inscribed on the image presented, he/she can then select a node of the network. Then, the keywords most frequently found in the associated documents are listed on the side of the map, as well as the corresponding number of documents. If the keywords are of interest to the user, he/she can click to access the appropriate secondary map when the node of the primary map is over-populated. If there is no over-population, the list of documents is immediately accessible.

The secondary maps are of the same form as the primary one and are used in the same way.

Note that when the list of articles is presented, the user can access the bibliographic services of the Strasbourg Data Centre (Fig. 7 below; Egret et al. 1995; Genova et al. 1996) in order to get the complete reference and abstract, astronomical object names cited in the article with links to the SIMBAD database for each object, and to tables from the paper when available in the CDS catalogue service, and in some cases to the complete text of the article.

The user interface is either via the cartographic display, or directly via keywords. The latter may be found of greater help to the user. Thus two interfaces are simultaneously supported: the clickable map, or the clickable selection of the keywords of interest.

  

Figure 4: View of the principal map