KG-EmpiRE: A Community-Maintainable Knowledge Graph for a Sustainable Literature Review on the State and Evolution of Empirical Research in Requirements Engineering

TL;DR

KG-EmpiRE is a community-maintained, open, and sustainable knowledge graph that systematically captures and updates empirical research in requirements engineering, enhancing the reproducibility and longevity of literature reviews.

Contribution

This work introduces KG-EmpiRE, a comprehensive, openly accessible knowledge graph of empirical RE research built on scientific data from 680 papers, with ongoing community maintenance and analysis tools.

Findings

KG-EmpiRE covers over 650 papers from 1994-2022.

The knowledge graph is openly available and maintained in ORKG.

The approach demonstrates sustainable, reproducible literature review practices.

Abstract

In the last two decades, several researchers provided snapshots of the "current" state and evolution of empirical research in requirements engineering (RE) through literature reviews. However, these literature reviews were not sustainable, as none built on or updated previous works due to the unavailability of the extracted and analyzed data. KG-EmpiRE is a Knowledge Graph (KG) of empirical research in RE based on scientific data extracted from currently 680 papers published in the IEEE International Requirements Engineering Conference (1994-2022). KG-EmpiRE is maintained in the Open Research Knowledge Graph (ORKG), making all data openly and long-term available according to the FAIR data principles. Our long-term goal is to constantly maintain KG-EmpiRE with the research community to synthesize a comprehensive, up-to-date, and long-term available overview of the state and evolution of empirical research in RE. Besides KG-EmpiRE, we provide its analysis with all supplementary materials in a repository. This repository contains all files with instructions for replicating and (re-)using the analysis locally or via executable environments and for repeating the research approach. Since its first release based on 199 papers (2014-2022), KG-EmpiRE and its analysis have been updated twice, currently covering over 650 papers. KG-EmpiRE and its analysis demonstrate how innovative infrastructures, such as the ORKG, can be leveraged to make data from literature reviews FAIR, openly available, and maintainable for the research community in the long term. In this way, we can enable replicable, (re-)usable, and thus sustainable literature reviews to ensure the quality, reliability, and timeliness of their research results.