As the General Chairman of WSOM 05, on behalf of the Organization Committee and its representatives, it is a pleasure to welcome you as a participant to the 5th Workshop on Self-Organizing Maps in Paris. WSOM 2005 will take place in the University Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, situated in a historical and famous place, in the hearth of “Latin Quarter” of the “Ville des Lumières”.

The Self-Organizing Map (SOM) and its related extensions are the most popular artificial neural algorithms used in unsupervised learning and data visualization. Over 6,000 publications have been reported in the literature, and many commercial projects employ the SOM as the tool for solving hard real-world problems. Since 8 years, the WSOM conferences are the discussion forums where your ideas and techniques are polished; they aim to unveil the results of hot researches and popularize the use of the SOM for the technical public.

Following the highly successful meetings held in 1997 and 1999 (Helsinki University of Technology), 2001 (University of Lincolnshire and Humberside) and 2003 (Kyushu Institute of Technology), this workshop aims to bring together researchers and users of the SOM and related techniques.

These proceedings contain all the contributions presented to WSOM 05 (6 invited papers and 86 oral and poster papers). We hope that the whole community will benefit from the edition of these proceedings, which will also be available in electronic version.

We are most thankful to all members of the Scientific Committee and of the Organizing Committee for their continued help and efforts to make this conference as successful as its predecessors. We want to thank the invited speakers who have agreed to offer plenary talks, all speakers and of course all participants for supporting WSOM 05 by their contributions and presence.

We also thank the Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne University to host the conference, the National Center of Scientific Research (CNRS) for their helpful support, as well as all the sponsors.