Taxonomy-as-a-Service: How To Structure Your Related Work

Abstract: Structuring related work is a daunting task encompassing literature review, classification, comparison (primarily in the form of concepts), and gap analysis. Building taxonomies is a compelling way to structure concepts in the literature yielding reusable and extensible models. However, constructing taxonomies as a product of literature reviews could become, to our experiences, immensely complex and error-prone. Including new literature or addressing errors may cause substantial changes (ripple effects) in taxonomies coping with which requires adequate tools. To this end, we propose a \emph{Taxonomy-as-a-Service (TaaS)} platform. TaaS combines the systematic paper review process with taxonomy development, visualization, and analysis capabilities. We evaluate the effectiveness and efficiency of our platform by employing it in the development of a real-world taxonomy. Our results indicate that our TaaS can be used to effectively craft and maintain UML-conforming taxonomies and thereby structure related work. The screencast of our tool demonstration is available at \url{https://goo.gl/GsTjsP}.