Researcher or Crowd Member? Why not both! The Open Research Knowledge Graph for Applying and Communicating CrowdRE Research

Abstract

In recent decades, there has been a major shift towards improved digital access to scholarly works. However, even now that these works are available in digital form, they remain document-based, making it difficult to communicate the knowledge they contain. The next logical step is to extend these works with more flexible, fine-grained, semantic, and context-sensitive representations of scholarly knowledge. The Open Research Knowledge Graph (ORKG) is a platform that structures and interlinks scholarly knowledge, relying on crowdsourced contributions from researchers (as a crowd) to acquire, curate, publish, and process this knowledge. In this experience report, we consider the ORKG in the context of Crowd-based Requirements Engineering (CrowdRE) from two perspectives:(1) As CrowdRE researchers, we investigate how the ORKG practically applies CrowdRE techniques to involve scholars in its development to make it align better with their academic work. We determined that the ORKG readily provides social and financial incentives, feedback elicitation channels, and support for context and usage monitoring, but that there is improvement potential regarding automated user feedback analyses and a holistic CrowdRE approach. (2) As crowd members, we explore how the ORKG can be used to communicate scholarly knowledge about CrowdRE research. For this purpose, we curated qualitative and quantitative scholarly knowledge in the ORKG based on papers contained in two previously published systematic literature reviews (SLRs) on CrowdRE. This knowledge can be explored and compared interactively, and with more data than what the SLRs originally contained. Therefore, the ORKG improves access and communication of the scholarly knowledge about CrowdRE research. For both perspectives, we found the ORKG to be a useful multi-tool for CrowdRE research.