Why? The "SOM Toolbox" project was initialized because there is no such thing as a proper SOM-library for the Matlab. Matlab is a magnificient computing environment, but the tools in its neural networks toolbox for SOM are not really up to the state-of-the-art. On the other hand the freeware SOM program package SOM_PAK is all well and good, but it's not nearly as flexible as the Matlab environment. So the plan is to offer a simple, well documented Matlab code package which is easy to use and modify in the diverse needs that different people unavoidably have.
Who? Currently, we have five grad and post-grad students involved in this. We are all employed by the Laboratory of Information and Computer Science in the Helsinki University of Technology. In alphabetical order:
SOM Toolbox is Copyright (C) 1997 by Esa Alhoniemi, Johan Himberg, Kimmo Kiviluoto, Jukka Parviainen and Juha Vesanto.
The software library is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or any later version.
The software package is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.
As stated in the GNU General Public License it is not possible to include this software library in a proprietary program without written permission from the owners of the copyright. If you wish to obtain such permission, you can reach us by paper mail:
SOM Toolbox team Laboratory of Computer and Information Science P.O.Box 2200 FIN-02015 HUT Finland Europeand by email: somtlbx@mail.cis.hut.fi.
If you have a question about SOM Toolbox that the documentation does not address, you can send e-mail to somtlbx@mail.cis.hut.fi. For awhile at least we try to answer all the questions and will try to fix any bugs you might find.
The current version of the toolbox is 1.0beta. It is questionable if we ever get around making version 1.0, but it happen when we think we have fixed most of the bugs. Any further versions are highly improbable.
However, we welcome any outside contributions that you may have. At least when we make further tools of our own, we'll add them to the contrib package of the toolbox.