Identifying the evolutionary process of emerging technologies: A chronological network analysis of World Wide Web conference sessions

Abstract

The significance of a computer-based approach in roadmapping processes will increase in accordance with the ever-larger number of scientific publications and enhanced computing technologies. This article proposes a method to analyse chronological changes in research topics as observed from proceedings papers and conference sessions using a text-mining technique, which enables us to detect, identify, and analyse the evolutionary process of emerging technologies in the many rapidly growing research fields. Chronological networks of conference sessions from World Wide Web conferences between 2002 and 2011 are used to visualize the scientific and technical streams formed by the session sequences. The chronological networks demonstrate the evolutionary process of ‘Social Networks’, ‘Monetization’ and ‘Semantic Analysis’ studies. In the evolutionary process of emerging web-based technology, the convergent session nodes that recapitulate past research topics and the divergent session nodes in the networks play significant roles in promoting dynamic interactions among research topics. The proposed method is distinctive in that it is prospective: the session titles reflect future perspectives, including researchers' expectations for pioneering new research fields within a scientific community. This article also discusses the characteristics of a textual method for scientific publication analysis in terms from the aspect coverage, data, links and stability.