Three knowledge visualization techniques have been presented in this paper, and
they are factor analysis, pathfinder networks and context-based ontology. Literature
published in the citation data from ISI web in 2008 were used to drive the research
trends. The comparison among the three techniques has also been discussed. The
results obtained show that application of ubiquitous computing in health care is one of
the most popular research area, followed by context awareness computing. The results
obtained also show that the factor analysis and PFNet provide a broader view of the
“ubiquitous computing” study whereas the context-based ontology focuses on
“ubiquitous multimedia computing” concepts.
The beneficiary of the results obtained could be for someone new to a specific
domain in research study. The proposed techniques could also be re-used in a number
of ways and could possibly be shared across different research domains. One of the
future research directions is to apply the proposed approaches to other disciplines. In
addition, the techniques can potentially be leveraged to research theme networks,
linking the relationships between publications, citations, research projects and even
patents. We also would like to apply the proposed approaches by using different
database, for example, google scholar.