Skip to main content

Toward an Information Systems Ontology

  • Conference paper
  • First Online:
The Transdisciplinary Reach of Design Science Research (DESRIST 2022)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNCS,volume 13229))

  • 1948 Accesses

Abstract

We introduce the Information Systems Ontology (ISO), a new ontology for the Information Systems (IS) discipline designed to enable automated knowledge synthesis and meta-analysis of research findings in IS. We constructed ISO in a methodical manner, following known best practices for ontology construction. We also conducted a series of ontology refinement steps in which we compared and extended ISO by extracting and examining both overlapping and missing key phrases from scientific articles and existing classification schemas. To evaluate ISO, we extracted author-defined keywords from more than 7,000 articles of the senior scholars’ basket of journals and measured terminological coverage. In one experiment, we found that our ontology included 3.6 times more author-defined keywords than an established classification schema for IS. In the future, we plan to use ISO to automatically annotate important IS terms and concepts in IS articles to help synthesize and analyze knowledge in IS.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this chapter

Subscribe and save

Springer+ Basic
$34.99 /Month
  • Get 10 units per month
  • Download Article/Chapter or eBook
  • 1 Unit = 1 Article or 1 Chapter
  • Cancel anytime
Subscribe now

Buy Now

Chapter
USD 29.95
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Purchases are for personal use only

Institutional subscriptions

Similar content being viewed by others

References

  1. AIS: Senior scholars’ basket of journals. https://aisnet.org/page/SeniorScholarBasket. Accessed 15 Nov 2021

  2. Arp, R., Smith, B., Spear, A.D.: Building Ontologies with Basic Formal Ontology. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA (2015)

    Book  Google Scholar 

  3. Astrakhantsev, N.: ATR4S: toolkit with state-of-the-art automatic terms recognition methods in scala. Lang. Res. Eval. 52(3), 853–872 (2016)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  4. Barki, H., Rivard, S., Talbot, J.: A keyword classification scheme for is research literature: an update. MIS Quart. 17(2), 209–226 (1993)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  5. Barki, H., Rivard, S., Talbot, J.: An information systems keyword classification scheme. MIS Quart. 12(2), 299 (1988)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  6. Beranek, D., Horan, T.: Toward an empirical user taxonomy for personal health records systems. In: AMCIS 2006 Proceedings (2006)

    Google Scholar 

  7. Bhattacherjee, A.: Social Science Research: Principles, Methods, and Practices. Global Text Projct, Textbooks Collection, Tampa, Florida (2012)

    Google Scholar 

  8. Chuang, S.-L., Chien, L.-F.: Taxonomy generation for text segments: a practical web-based approach. ACM Trans. Inform. Syst. 23(4), 363–396 (2005)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  9. Cohen, J.: A coefficient of agreement for nominal scales. Educ. Psychol. Measur. 20(1), 37–46 (1960)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  10. Fathalla, S., Vahdati, S., Auer, S., Lange, C.: SemSur: a core ontology for the semantic representation of research findings. Procedia Comput. Sci. 137, 151–162 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1016/j.procs.2018.09.015

    Article  Google Scholar 

  11. Fteimi, N., Lehner, F.: Analysing and classifying knowledge management publications – a proposed classification scheme. J. Knowl. Manag. 22(7), 1527–1554 (2018)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  12. Gonzalez-Beltran, A., Rocca-Serra, P.: Statistics ontology - NCBO BioPortal. https://bioportal.bioontology.org/ontologies/STATO. Accessed 28 Jan 2022

  13. Gregg, D.G., Scott, J.E.: A typology of complaints about eBay sellers. Commun. ACM 51(4), 69–74 (2008)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  14. Hevner, A.R., Chatterjee, S.: Design Research in Information Systems: Theory and Practice. Springer, New York, London (2010)

    Book  Google Scholar 

  15. Justeson, J.S., Katz, S.M.: Technical terminology: some linguistic properties and an algorithm for identification in text. Nat. Lang. Eng. 1(1), 9–27 (1995). https://doi.org/10.1017/S1351324900000048

    Article  Google Scholar 

  16. Kevin Lu: PyATE documentation homepage. https://kevin-lu.tech/pyate/index.html. Accessed 17 Nov 2021

  17. Ko, A., Gillani, S.: A Research review and taxonomy development for decision support and business analytics using semantic text mining. Int. J. Inf. Technol. Decis. Mak. 19(01), 97–126 (2020)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  18. Kupfer, A.: Research methods in the information systems discipline: a literature analysis of conference papers. In: Proceedings of the Twenty-fourth Americas Conference on Information Systems (AMCIS) (2018)

    Google Scholar 

  19. Larsen, K.R., Eargle, D.: Theories used in IS research Wiki. https://is.theorizeit.org. Accessed 25 Nov 2021

  20. Laudon, K.C., Laudon, J.P.: Management Information Systems: Managing the Digital Firm. Pearson, Hoboken, NJ (2020)

    Google Scholar 

  21. Mertens, W., Pugliese, A., Recker, J.: Quantitative Data Analysis: A Companion for Accounting and Information Systems Research. Springer International Publishing, Switzerland (2018)

    Google Scholar 

  22. Miles, J.A.: Management and Organization Theory: A Jossey-Bass Reader. Jossey-Bass, San Francisco, CA (2012)

    Google Scholar 

  23. Nickerson, R., Muntermann, J., Varshney, U., Isaac, H.: Taxonomy development in information systems: developing a taxonomy of mobile applications. In: HAL, Working Papers (2009)

    Google Scholar 

  24. Oates, B.J.: Researching Information Systems and Computing. SAGE Publications, London (2006)

    Google Scholar 

  25. Pertsas, V., Constantopoulos, P.: Scholarly ontology: modelling scholarly practices. Int. J. Digit. Libr. 18(3), 173–190 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00799-016-0169-3

    Article  Google Scholar 

  26. Recker, J.: Scientific Research in Information Systems. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg (2013)

    Book  Google Scholar 

  27. Salatino, A.A., Thanapalasingam, T., Mannocci, A., Osborne, F., Motta, E.: The computer science ontology: a large-scale taxonomy of research areas. In: Vrandečić, D., et al. (eds.) ISWC 2018. LNCS, vol. 11137, pp. 187–205. Springer, Cham (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-00668-6_12

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  28. Schöbel, S., Janson, A.: Is it All About Having Fun? - Developing a taxonomy to Gamify information systems. Presented at the European Conference on Information Systems (ECIS) June 24 (2018)

    Google Scholar 

  29. Springer, V., Petrik, D.: Towards a taxonomy of impact factors for digital platform pricing. In: Gregory, P., Kruchten, P. (eds.) XP 2021. LNBIP, vol. 426, pp. 115–124. Springer, Cham (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-88583-0_11

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  30. Triperina, E., Sgouropoulou, C., Tsolakidis, A.: AcademIS: an ontology for representing academic activity and collaborations within HEIs. In: Proceedings of the 17th Panhellenic Conference on Informatics, pp. 264–271. Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA (2013)

    Google Scholar 

  31. ZBW - Leibniz information centre for economics: STW thesaurus for economics. https://zbw.eu/stw/version/9.12/about.en.html. Accessed 25 Nov 2021

  32. Zedeck, S.: APA Dictionary of Statistics and Research Methods. American Psychological Association, Washington (2014)

    Book  Google Scholar 

  33. ACM: Digital library: communications of the ACM. https://dl.acm.org/doi/fullHtml/https://doi.org/10.1145/2366316.2366320. Accessed 31 Jan 2022

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

Authors

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Roland M. Mueller .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

© 2022 Springer Nature Switzerland AG

About this paper

Check for updates. Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this paper

Mueller, R.M., Huettemann, S., Larsen, K.R., Yan, S., Handler, A. (2022). Toward an Information Systems Ontology. In: Drechsler, A., Gerber, A., Hevner, A. (eds) The Transdisciplinary Reach of Design Science Research. DESRIST 2022. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 13229. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-06516-3_5

Download citation

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-06516-3_5

  • Published:

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-031-06515-6

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-031-06516-3

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

Publish with us

Policies and ethics