Abstract: A system, method and computer program product for representing precise or imprecise measurements of similarity/dissimilarity (relationships) between objects as distances between points in a multi-dimensional space that represents the objects. Self-organizing principles are used to iteratively refine an initial (random or partially ordered) configuration of points using stochastic relationship/distance errors. The data can be complete or incomplete (i.e. some relationships between objects may not be known), exact or inexact (i.e. some or all of the relationships may be given in terms of allowed ranges or limits), symmetric or asymmetric (i.e. the relationship of object A to object B may not be the same as the relationship of B to A) and may contain systematic or stochastic errors. The relationships between objects may be derived directly from observation, measurement, a priori knowledge, or intuition, or may be determined indirectly using any suitable technique for deriving proximity (relationship) data.