Expert systems have proved to be excellent tools for the control of mineral processes. An expert system based on on-line classification of the ore type has been designed and is described in. this paper The neural approach to computation has emerged in recent years for dealing with the sort of problems for which more conventional solutions have proven ineffective. In the study a comparison between the on-line cluster algorithm and the Kohonen feature map for ore type classification is presented. The study was carried out with measurement data from the Outokumpu Hitura mine.