Three-dimensional display of document set

A method of determining and displaying the relative content and context of a number of documents in a large document set, wherein the relationships of a plurality of documents are presented in a three-dimensional landscape with the relative size and height of a peak in the three-dimensional landscape representing the relative significance of the relationship of a topic attribute and the individual documents in the document set, comprising the steps of:

• (a) building an electronic database of a plurality of documents;
• (b) creating a plurality of high dimensional vectors, one for each of said plurality of documents such that each of said high dimensional vectors represents the relative relationship of the individual documents to the topic attribute;
• (c) arranging said high dimensional vectors into clusters, each of said clusters representing a plurality of documents grouped by the relative significance of their relationship to a topic attribute;
• (d) calculating centroid coordinates as the center of mass of each cluster, the centroid coordinates being stored or projected in a two-dimensional plane;
• (e) constructing a vector for each document, said vector containing the distance from the document to each centroid coordinate in high-dimensional space;
• (f) creating a plurality of term layers, each of said term layers corresponding to a descriptive term applied to each cluster, and identifying x,y coordinates for each document associated with each term layer;
• and
• (g) creating a z coordinate associated with each term layer for each x,y coordinate by applying a smoothing function to the x,y coordinates for each document, and superimposing upon one another all of said term layers.