Accessing the Design Science Knowledge Base - A Search Engine for the Accumulation of Knowledge Across Decentrally Organized Publications

Abstract

Design science research (DSR) intends to contribute design knowledge to the scientific discourse in the field of Information Systems. However, such design knowledge is typically produced in isolated DSR projects and does not follow a systematic knowledge accumulation strategy in terms of refining or extending previous design knowledge. Towards a first step in fostering design knowledge reuse and supporting knowledge accumulation in DSR, we propose a design knowledge search engine facilitating access to existing design knowledge. In this paper, we present a knowledge extraction template, a mechanism to automatically extract design knowledge of existing DSR publications based on this template as well as a search interface. Applying DSR ourselves we report on the preliminary results and findings of the first design cycle and deliver (1) design requirements derived from the literature, (2) propose an initial set of design principles, (3) a prototypical implementation called DEKNOWSE, and (4) an evaluation of the first design cycle in a focus group with DSR researchers. We contribute design knowledge for the class of design knowledge extraction and search systems.