• Overview

Amazon Similarity Explorer

Web of Knowledge

Comparison

References

Overview

Intellectual webs of documents are information structures in which individual entities - documents - are related to others in the web through a linking mechanism. This project explores webs created from two different sources: Amazon.com, and Web of Knowledge. The entities chosen from Amazon.com share a relationship through "similar to" associations. Entities from Web of Knowledge are related through scholarly citation.

This project consists of several parts:

• The Amazon Similarity Explorer is an interactive tool that builds intellectual webs from Amazon.com's "Similar to..." lists by directly interrogating the Amazon.com database.
  
• "Web of Knowledge" describes the search process involved in building an intellectual web on the topic of "open citation linking" and analyzes the relationships discovered among the ten documents selected for inclusion.
  
• "Comparison" discusses similarities and differences between the Amazon and Web of Knowledge exercises.

The need for organization in a world awash in information has never been greater. This project explores two contemporary approaches to very traditional problems of information organization.