Visualising intellectual structure of ubiquitous computing

Abstract

It is difficult to reveal the growth of scientific knowledge even in one's own specialise field due to the enormous amount of research publications available. Providing scientists with knowledge visualisation tools to discover the existence of a scientific paradigm and movements of such paradigms is a challenge task. This paper introduces the state of the art of visualising knowledge structures. The aim of visualising knowledge structures is to capture intellectual structures of a particular knowledge domain. Approaches to the visualisation of knowledge structures with emphasis on the role of citation-based methods are described. Literature published in the online citation data bases CiteSeer and Web of Science (WoS) are exploited to drive the main research themes and their inter-relationships in ubiquitous computing. The Pearson correlation coefficients between items (papers) were used as the basis for PFNET scaling. The intellectual structure map of ubiquitous computing can be revealed by applying PFNET to the main research themes. The major research themes and their interrelationships can be easily identified by the intellectual structure map. The benefit of the results obtained could be for someone new to a specific domain in research study. © 2010 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.