These days I am pretty busy working with Lorenzo on our super secret project on Context Network Graphs. On our work schedule we had a delay due to the fact that we were trying to find a decent way to show a document collection on a two-dimensional map. We started with an ordered list of documents with ranking values.

From this one-dimensional situation we had to develop a second dimension of information and I can now swear that was not easy. We choose to use triangulation and the biggest problem we fought was that some triangle did not close properly. This document demonstrate how to compute if three documents can be placed in a triangle.

To verify that I did a quick hack in Python that was showing some gaps in the circles formed between each couple of points (see picture below). This was fun. To find how to fix this was not fun at all. But finally …

Tags: clustering, hack, information retrieval, map algorithms, maps, Python