Toward an Information Systems Ontology

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.