Ontological Support for the Use of Design Science Research Results

Abstract

In applied fields of research, Design Science Research (DSR) produces practical and theoretical knowledge in the form of descriptions of new rtefacts with utility for particular purpose(s). People, including researchers and practitioners, need to identify, access, comprehend, and synthesize DSR results. This paper addresses these issues by describing and demonstrating a design of a formal DSR ontology approach to represent the essential semantics of the DSR results presented in a DSR document. The proposed ontology (DSRDCO) extends the UMBEL reference ontology of over 35,000 concepts. DSRDCO can be used in the context of a digital library or of the semantic web and can support search and automatic summarisation of DSR publications. Ideally, a summary of DSR results would fulfil five Cs: comprehensive, concise, coherent, correct, and clear. Feasibility of this approach has been evaluated by demonstration, which will be followed by an expert evaluation.