An Ontology-Based Approach to Semi-Automate Systematic Literature Reviews

A Systematic Literature Review (SLR) allows us to combine and analyze data from multiple (published and unpublished) studies. Though it provides a complete and comprehensive empirical evidence of an area of interest, the results we usually get from the data synthesis phase of an SLR include huge tables and graphs and thus, for users, it is a tedious and time-consuming job to get the required results. In this work, we propose to semi-automate some steps which can be used to fetch the information from an SLR, beyond the traditional tables, graphs, and plots. The automation is performed using Semantic Web technologies like ontology, Jena API and SPARQL queries. The Semantic Web, also called Web 3.0, provides a common framework and thus allows us to share and re-use the data across the applications and enterprises. It can be used to integrate, extract, and infer the most relevant data required by the users, which are hidden behind the huge information on the Web. We also provide an easy-to-use user interface in order to allow users to perform different searches and find their required SLR results easily and quickly. Finally, we present the results of a preliminary user study performed to analyze the amount of time users need to extract their required information, both via the SLR tables and our proposal. The results revealed that with our system the users get their required information in less time compared to the manual system.