Knowledge Structures for Visualising Advanced Research and Trends

Due to the enormous amount of research publications are available, perceiving the growth of scientific knowledge even in one’s own specialise field is a challenge task. It would be helpful if we could provide scientists with knowledge visualisation tools to discover the existence of a scientific paradigm and movements of such paradigms. This chapter 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. The principal components of factor analysis and Pathfinder network are utilized to reveal new and signification developments of intellectual structure in ubiquitous computing research area. 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 benefit of the results obtained could be for someone new to a specific domain in research study, ubiquitous computing in this case. The outcome uncovers popular topics and important research in the particular domain. Potential developments can be re-used and utilized in other disciplines and share across different research domains.