# Taxonomy-as-a-Service: How To Structure Your Related Work

## TL;DR

This paper introduces Taxonomy-as-a-Service (TaaS), a platform designed to streamline the creation and maintenance of research taxonomies, making literature review and concept classification more systematic, efficient, and less error-prone.

## Contribution

We propose a novel TaaS platform that integrates literature review, taxonomy development, visualization, and analysis to improve the process of structuring related work.

## Key findings

- TaaS effectively supports UML-conforming taxonomy creation.
- The platform enhances efficiency in taxonomy development.
- It facilitates maintenance and updates of taxonomies.

## Abstract

Structuring related work is a daunting task encompassing literature review, classification, comparison (primarily in the form of concepts), and gap analysis. Building taxonomies is a compelling way to structure concepts in the literature yielding reusable and extensible models. However, constructing taxonomies as a product of literature reviews could become, to our experiences, immensely complex and error-prone. Including new literature or addressing errors may cause substantial changes (ripple effects) in taxonomies coping with which requires adequate tools. To this end, we propose a \emph{Taxonomy-as-a-Service (TaaS)} platform. TaaS combines the systematic paper review process with taxonomy development, visualization, and analysis capabilities. We evaluate the effectiveness and efficiency of our platform by employing it in the development of a real-world taxonomy. Our results indicate that our TaaS can be used to effectively craft and maintain UML-conforming taxonomies and thereby structure related work. The screencast of our tool demonstration is available at \url{https://goo.gl/GsTjsP}.