Ontologies to help mapmakers: an undergraduate thesis tackles the hardest step of systematic mapping
Igor de Araújo Ramos defended at FCTE/UnB an undergraduate thesis proposing the use of ontologies to support the thorniest step of systematic mappings: turning collected data into a knowledge map that is actually usable.
Brasília, 2015
Any researcher who has tried to consolidate hundreds of papers into a usable synthesis knows where things get stuck: turning the collected material into a map that others can actually navigate. This was the bottleneck Igor de Araújo Ramos chose to face in his undergraduate thesis defended in 2015 at FCTE/UnB, advised by Prof. Fabiana Freitas Mendes .
The work departs from a diagnosis shared across the Evidence-Based Software Engineering community: systematic mapping is now one of the most widely adopted methodologies for structured reviews — and yet the very step of building the representative knowledge map suffers from a lack of clear process and supporting tools. The result is well known: hand-crafted maps built with hard-to-reproduce criteria and poor comparability across studies.
The author’s proposal places ontologies at the backbone of that step. More than a taxonomy of concepts, an ontology works as a shared vocabulary that captures the relationships found in the reviewed papers — and from that, the map can be generated systematically. The methodological move speaks both to AI and knowledge representation and to practices of digital transformation of scientific work itself: more traceability, less improvisation.
The full text — written in Portuguese — is available at the UnB Undergraduate Theses Digital Library.
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