Tracking Latent Domain Knowledge - Mapping Scientific Frontiers: The Quest for Knowledge Visualization - page 226

Knowledge tracking and technology monitoring tools have become an
increasingly important part of knowledge management. The rapid advances of
information visualization in the past few years have highlighted its great potential
in knowledge discovery and data mining (Chen 2002 ; Chen and Paul 2001 ).
In Chap. 6 , we have studied a few examples of competing paradigms with
reference to Thomas Kuhn's theory on the structure of scientific revolutions
(Kuhn 1962 ). According to Kuhn's theory, most of the time scientists are engaged
in normal science, which is predominated by an established framework. The
foundations of such frameworks largely remain unchallenged until new discoveries
begin to cast doubts over fundamental issues - science falls into a period of crises.
To resolve such crises, radically new theories with greater explanatory power are
introduced. New theories replace the ones in trouble in a revolutionary manner.
Science regains another period of normal science. Scientific revolutions are an
integral part of science and such revolutionary changes advance science. We have
investigated the potential role of information visualization in revealing the dynamics
of scientific paradigms, such as scientific debates over dinosaurs' mass extinction,
and supermassive black holes (See Chap. 6 ) .

7.2.1 Undiscovered Public Knowledge

In Chap. 5 , we mentioned Donald Swanson was the recipient of the 2000 Award
of Merit from ASIS&T for his work in undiscovered public knowledge. In his
Award of Merit acceptance speech, Swanson ( 2001 ) stressed the enormous and
fast-growing gap between the entire body of recorded knowledge and the limited
human capacity to make sense of it. He also pointed out knowledge fragmentation as
the consequences of inadequate cross-specialty communication. Because specialties
are increasingly divided into more and more narrowly focused subspecialties in
response to the information explosion.
Swanson has been pursuing his paradigm since 1986 when he began to realize
that there were two sizeable but bibliographically unrelated biomedical literatures:
one on the circulatory effects of dietary fish oil and the other on the peripheral
circulatory disorder - Raynaud's disease. Prior to Swanson's research, no medical
researcher had noticed this connection, and the indexing of these two literatures was
unlikely to facilitate the discovery of any such connections.
Swanson's paradigm focuses on the possibility that information in one specialty
might be of value in another without anyone becoming aware of the fact. Specialized
literatures that do not intercommunicate by citing one another may nonetheless have
many implicit textual interconnections based on meaning. The number of latent,
unintended or implicit, connections within the literature of science may greatly
exceed the number of explicit connections.
Swanson and Smalheiser ( 1997 )defined noninteractive literatures as two lit-
eratures that have not been connected by a significant citation tie. In other
words, scientists in both camps have not regarded the existence of a meaningful