Database Tomography (DT) is a textual database analysis system consisting of two major components: 1) Algorithms for extracting multiword phrase frequencies and phrase proximities (physical closeness of the multiword technical phrases) from any type of large textual database, to augment 2) interpretative capabilities of the expert human analyst. DT was used to derive technical intelligence from a hypersonic/supersonic flow (HSF) database derived from the Science Citation Index and the Engineering Compendex. Phrase frequency analysis by the technical domain expert provided the pervasive technical themes of the HSF database, and the phrase proximity analysis provided the relationships among the pervasive technical themes. Bibliometric analysis of the HSF literature supplemented the DT results with author/ journal/institution publication and citation data. Comparisons of HSF results with past analyses of similarly structured near-earth space and Chemistry databases are made. One important finding is that many of the normalized bibliometric distribution functions are extremely consistent across these diverse technical domains.
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