Database tomography for technical intelligence: A roadmap of the near-earth space science and technology literature

Database Tomography (DT) is a system which includes algorithms for extracting multi-word phrase frequencies and performing phrase proximity analyses (relating physical closeness of the multi-word technical phrases to thematic relationships) on any type of large textual database. As an illustration of the DT process applied to the published literature, DT was used to derive technical intelligence from a near-earth space (NES) database derived from the Science Citation Index and the Engineering Compendex. Phase frequency analysis (the occurrence frequency of multi-word technical phrases) provided the pervasive technical themes of the space database, and the phrase proximity analysis provided the relationships among the pervasive technical themes. Bibliometric analysis of the NES literature supplemented the DT results by identifying: the recent most prolific NES authors; the journals which contain numerous NES papers; the institutions which produce numerous NES papers; the keywords most frequently specified by the NES authors; the authors whose works are cited most frequently in the NES papers; and the particular papers and journals cited most frequently in the NES papers.