In 1998 a freeware program started informally circulating in forensic archaeological and anthropological circles. Its purpose is to rapidly find the nearest neighbours of a particular object in the three dimensional space of an excavation. It is intended for post-excavation analysis and to assist with the physical reconstruction of bodies.
Now that I have returned to more benign forms of archaeology and anthropology it occurs to me that the program (which I wrote) could be of more general use in cases where the XYZ coordinates of objects have been surveyed. One example that comes to mind is the finding of conjoins amongst stone artefacts.
For each specified object, the program allows you to ask for either (1) a particular number of neighbours or (2) the radius of a sphere centered on the specified object and within which the neighbours must occur. It then produces a list of neighbours as a text file, in increasing order of distance from the specified object.
A version of this freeware program, together with instructions, is downloadable for saving from
http://box.net/public/richwrig/dfiles/NN3D.ZIP
If you want to communicate with me about this program then please use the email address [log in to unmask]