KG-EmpiRE: A Community-Maintainable Knowledge Graph of Empirical Research in Requirements Engineering
Oliver Karras, Felix Wernlein, Jil Klünder, Sören Auer · Institutional Repository of Leibniz Universität Hannover (Leibniz Universität Hannover) · 2024
In this summary, we present our paper “Divide and Conquer the EmpiRE: A Community-Maintainable Knowledge Graph of Empirical Research in Requirements Engineering” [ Ka23b] which received the best paper award of the 17th ACM/IEEE International Symposium on Empirical Software Engineering and Measurement, 2023. Several papers address the topic of “Empirical research in requirements engineering (RE)” and provide a snapshot of its “current” state and evolution using literature reviews. However, these papers have never built on or updated earlier ones, as the underlying data is not available. Researchers need technical infrastructures to conduct sustainable literature reviews. We examine the use of the Open Research Knowledge Graph (ORKG) as such an infrastructure to build and publish a Knowledge Graph of Empirical research in RE (KG-EmpiRE) whose data is openly available. Our long-term goal is to continuously maintain KG-EmpiRE with the research community to synthesize a comprehensive, up-to-date, and long-term available overview. We conduct a literature review using the ORKG to build and publish KG-EmpiRE which we evaluate against competency questions. From 570 papers of the IEEE International Requirements Engineering Conference (2000 – 2022), we extract and analyze data on the reported empirical research and answer 16 out of 77 competency questions. These answers show a positive development of applied empirical research in RE, but also the need for future improvements. The ORKG is a ready-to-use and advanced infrastructure for organizing data from literature reviews as knowledge graphs, making the data openly available and maintainable by research communities and thus enabling sustainable literature reviews.