The first map (Figure 1) shows the amount of research done in different fields. Medicine and Molecular & Cell Biology is very present in this map. But also the Geosciences area is not so small. Computer Science and Geosciences together are the foundation of GIS.
Figure 1: (Click on the map to enlarge)
If we also consider other sciences like Operations Research we are dealing with Spatial Decision Support Systems (SDSS). For example if we combine Geosciences with Mathematics we are taking about Geocomputation. And there a lot of other disciplines which can be compined with Geosciences.
Figure 2: André Skupin, In Terms of Geography, 2005
This map (Figure 2) is a visualization derived from more than 22,000 abstracts submitted to the Annual Meetings of the Association of American Geographers during a ten-year period from 1993 to 2002. The methodology is centered around the representation of each document as an n-dimensional vector of terms. These vectors are used to construct a neural network model of the geographic knowledge domain using a Self-Organizing Map (SOM). The neural network model is then transformed into two types of information: (1) a landscape in which elevation indicates the degree to which a single, focused topic is addressed; and (2) multilevel text labels associated with regions in the visualization. The final rendering was executed in standard geographic information systems (GIS) software.
[via SciMaps.org]
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