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

The paper addresses the fragility of traditional literature reviews in empirical requirements engineering (RE) due to inaccessible, non-updatable data. It introduces KG-EmpiRE, a knowledge graph hosted in the Open Research Knowledge Graph (ORKG), built from 680 IEEE RE conference papers spanning 1994–2022, and organized via a SHACL-based template across six themes. The work provides a public repository with a reproducible analysis workflow, reporting that KG-EmpiRE comprises roughly 35k triples, 51k resources, and 18.8k literals, and answers 16 of 77 competency questions to illuminate the state and evolution of empirical RE research. It demonstrates how FAIR, open infrastructures can support sustainable, collaborative literature reviews with long-term availability and reusability, enabling continual updates and improved reliability of review results.

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.