Hypersonic and supersonic flow roadmaps using bibliometrics and database tomography

Database Tomography (DT) is a textual database analysis system consisting o f two major components: 1) Algorithms for extracting multiword phrase frequ encies and phrase proximities (physical closeness of the multiword technica l phrases) from any type of large textual database, to augment 2) interpret ative capabilities of the expert human analyst. DT was used to derive techn ical intelligence from a hypersonic/supersonic flow (HSF) database derived from the Science Citation Index and the Engineering Compendex. Phrase frequ ency analysis by the technical domain expert provided the pervasive technic al themes of the HSF database, and the phrase proximity analysis provided t he relationships among the pervasive technical themes. Bibliometric analysi s of the HSF literature supplemented the DT results with author/journal/ins titution publication and citation data. Comparisons of HSF results with pas t analyses of similarly structured near-earth space and Chemistry databases are made. One important finding is that many of the normalized bibliometri c distribution functions are extremely consistent across these diverse tech nical domains.