Towards a Knowledge Graph Representing Research Findings by Semantifying Survey Articles

Despite significant advances in technology, the way how research is done and especially communicated has not changed much. We have the vision that ultimately researchers will work on a common knowledge base comprising comprehensive descriptions of their research, thus making research contributions transparent and comparable. The current approach for structuring, systematizing and comparing research results is via survey or review articles. In this article, we describe how surveys for research fields can be represented in a semantic way, resulting in a knowledge graph that describes the individual research problems, approaches, implementations and evaluations in a structured and comparable way. We present a comprehensive ontology for capturing the content of survey articles. We discuss possible applications and present an evaluation of our approach with the retrospective, exemplary semantification of a survey. We demonstrate the utility of the resulting knowledge graph by using it to answer queries about the different research contributions covered by the survey and evaluate how well the query answers serve readers’ information needs, in comparison to having them extract the same information from reading a survey paper.