Mapping knowledge domains

The term “mapping knowledge domains” was chosen to describe a newly evolving interdisciplinary area of science aimed at the process of charting, mining, analyzing, sorting, enabling navigation of, and displaying knowledge. This field is aimed at easing information access, making evident the structure of knowledge, and allowing seekers of knowledge to succeed in their endeavors. Although thousands of years old, this area has undergone a sea change in the last 15 years, a change fostered by an explosion of the amount of information available, the accessibility of that information due to electronic storage, and the new techniques of analysis, retrieval, and visualization that are made possible by vast increases in computational storage capacity and processing speed and power. Many of us are so involved in the new ways of accessing knowledge that we have forgotten how recent is the change to computerized knowledge retrieval with search engines operating on the World Wide Web. Remarkable as these changes are to date, they are only a hint of the transformation to come. The Arthur M. Sackler Colloquium on Mapping Knowledge Domains, held at the Arnold and Mabel Beckman Center of the National Academies of Sciences and Engineering in Irvine, CA, May 9-11, 2003, was designed to showcase the ongoing developments in this transformation and provide pointers toward the directions it will move. The changes that are taking place profoundly affect the way we access and use information. Scientists, academics, and librarians have historically worked hard to codify, classify, and organize knowledge, thereby making it useful and accessible. The day is fast approaching when all this knowledge will be coded electronically, but mixed in a vast and largely disorganized and often unreliable sea of mostly recent information. Fishing this sea for desired information is presently no easy task and will continue to increase …