Abstract
Researchers often have to understand new knowledge areas, and identify research gaps and immature areas in them. They have to understand and link numerous publications to achieve this goal. This is difficult, because natural language has to be analyzed in the publications, and implicit relations between them have to be discovered. We propose to utilize the structuring possibilities of ontologies to make the relations between publications, knowledge objects (e.g., methods, tools, notations), and knowledge areas explicit. Furthermore, we use Kitchenham’s work on structured literature reviews and apply it to the ontology. We formalize relations between objects in the ontology using Codd’s relational algebra to support different kinds of literature research. These formal expressions are implemented as ontology queries. Thus, we implement an immature research area analysis and research gap identification mechanism. The ontology and its relations are implemented based on the Semantic MediaWiki+ platform.
This research was partially supported by the EU project Network of Excellence on Engineering Secure Future Internet Software Services and Systems (NESSoS, ICT-2009.1.4 Trustworthy ICT, Grant No. 256980).
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Beckers, K., Eicker, S., Faßbender, S., Heisel, M., Schmidt, H., Schwittek, W. (2012). Ontology-Based Identification of Research Gaps and Immature Research Areas. In: Quirchmayr, G., Basl, J., You, I., Xu, L., Weippl, E. (eds) Multidisciplinary Research and Practice for Information Systems. CD-ARES 2012. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 7465. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-32498-7_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-32498-7_1
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