Patent ID: 7716169

Claim:
A system for extracting and clustering information, the system comprising: a clustering criterion designing unit reconstructing a hierarchy of a plurality of clustering criteria in order to design a new clustering criterion, at least one of the plurality of clustering criteria being defined by a user; an input data processing unit extracting characteristics from input data based on the new clustering criterion; and a clustering unit performing clustering of the extracted characteristics using the hierarchy of the plurality of clustering criteria, in which the extracted characteristics are clustered by a first criterion of the plurality of criteria to produce a result and the result is further clustered by a second criterion of the plurality of criteria, wherein the clustering unit performs clustering on the characteristics based on a clustering method selected from the group consisting of a K-means algorithm, an iterative self organizing data technique (ISODATA), a self organizing map (SOM), and a hierarchical clustering algorithm, said clustering unit outputting to an output device the results of said clustering.