Ubiquitous Computing in Prospect: A Bibliographic Study

There have been many surveys on various ubiquitous computing related topics. These surveys were written based on the information subjectively selected by the author(s), according to a rather limited set of references. Since the literature related to ubiquitous computing is voluminous, it is difficult to analyze and grasp the main research themes using traditional methods. We therefore used the methodology devised by the information scientists that has been successfully applied in analyzing a large amount of literature. We applied the principal components analysis and Pathfinder network to derive the intellectual structure of ubiquitous computing research. From the emergent intellectual structure, we identify the major research themes in ubiquitous computing, and show some of their inter-relationships.