Structuring Scientific Knowledge in Software Engineering Using the Open Research Knowledge Graph

Until now, papers have been the central communication medium for new research outcomes and findings that enhance the current body of scientific knowledge. In software engineering (SE), those research artifacts are aligned to further replication artifacts, comprising data and software underlying the empirical findings in a paper with validity and evidence. The research community is aware of the need for infrastructures with services that support the Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable (FAIR) principles that foster and improve research data management. This implies a more convenient research environment and an easier knowledge transfer to research and practice. In this paper, we aim to explore the use of the Open Research Knowledge Graph (ORKG) for semantic structuring of research artifacts using the concept of ORKG template specification, supporting the aforementioned vision. Therefore, we present a use case in one of the research sub-fields of SE, namely software architecture and design (SWA). We explore the capabilities of the ORKG for describing semantic structures in this research field and discuss design decisions for the template specification. In addition, we present our developed tool Visulite which aims to contribute to a multi-modal knowledge graph like ORKG. Based on our work, we derive hints and share our insights with the research community. Moreover, we provide an open-access repository to maintain and document the different evolution steps w.r.t. our template specification for traceability, comprehension, and benchmarking purposes. In future work, we aim to maintain our evolved data schemas in SWA and the corresponding ORKG templates for the research community, fostering collaborations and benchmarking them to similar approaches to build consensus in SE research w.r.t. semantic structuring of research artifacts.