Visualizing knowledge domains

This chapter reviews visualization techniques that can not only be utilized to map the evergrowing domain structure of scientific disciplines but that also support information retrieval and classification. In contrast to the comprehensive surveys done in a traditional way by Howard White and Katherine McCain (1997; 1998), the current survey not only reviews emerging techniques in interactive data analysis and information visualization, but also visualizes bibliographical structures of the field as an integral part of our methodology. The chapter starts with a review of the history of knowledge domain visualizations. We then introduce a general process flow for the visualization of knowledge domains and explain commonly used techniques. In the interest of visualizing the domain this article reviews, we introduce a bibliographic data set of considerable size, which includes articles from the citation analysis, bibliometrics, semantics, and visualization literatures. Using a tutorial style, we then apply various algorithms to demonstrate the visualization effects produced by different approaches and compare the different visualization results. At the same time, the domain visualizations reveal the relationships within and between the four fields that together form the topic of this chapter, domain visualization. We conclude with a discussion of promising new avenues of research and a general discussion.