Toward an Information Systems Ontology

A theory landscape of design: mapping the theoretical discourse of the discipline

“…(2) Cash and colleagues (Cash, 2020;Cash et al, 2019) presented a collection of 101 design-related theories. In a more systematic approach, Mueller and colleagues developed a theory ontology for the information systems (IS) discipline (Mueller et al, 2022). This ontology contained 321 theoretical entities.…”

“…This ontology contained 321 theoretical entities. An ontology is a taxonomy that groups entities in a hierarchical and semantically meaningful manner and defines additional attributes and relationships between them (Mueller et al, 2022). That means, unlike an unstructured list of theories, as presented, for example, by Cash et al (2019), an ontology provides additional semantic connections between entities.…”

“…That means, unlike an unstructured list of theories, as presented, for example, by Cash et al (2019), an ontology provides additional semantic connections between entities. Therefore, an ontology enables automated knowledge synthesis and metaanalysis of research findings (Mueller et al, 2022). We expanded the three sources mentioned above with additional design theories and considered possible synonyms.…”

“…The analysis of the 4,451 papers was conducted using an automated approach with the help of natural language processing (NLP). First, the structure of the PDFs and different parts of the articles, like the section titles, citations, and sources, were extracted (Mueller et al, 2022;Mueller & Huettemann, 2018).…”

“…Then, from the extracted full text of the papers, theory entities were recognized and linked to the theory ontology (Mueller et al, 2022). The named theories are recognized anywhere in the paper and are also included if there are no citations to the reference.…”