Temporal network analysis of emerging technologies: Topic transition in World Wide Web (WWW) conferences

This paper proposes the use of temporal network analysis of conference sessions to examine the evolutionary process of emerging technologies as significant information for strategic R&D decision-making. This study examines the emerging processes of rapidly growing web-based technologies by analyzing World Wide Web (WWW) conferences over the latest decade. Temporal networks are demonstrated through scientific and technical streams relating Social Network and Monetization. In particular, the transition from E-community in 2006 to Social Networks in 2008 strongly affects later research. Monetization originates from the Auction and E-Commerce session in 2002 and is derived from Advertisements & Click Estimation and Sponsored Search. The conference session titles can be considered as conceptualized meta-knowledge created by the scientific community. The proposed method has the advantage of not requiring any prior knowledge in conceptualization compared to bottom-up clustering techniques used in citation analysis and text mining.