Kohonen´s feature maps applied to ordered clustering applications

An application to a computer-aided design database using Kohonen´s self-organizing feature maps is discussed. An input representation is chosen to decode the input geometric drawings into a vector of 12 elements for each drawing. The input vectors are then mapped to 1D Kohonen feature maps. Upon convergence, the output nodes organize themselves in ascending or descending order, resulting in a sorted output of the clusters of similar geometric figures