Coding-Data Portability in Systematic Literature Reviews: a W3C's Open Annotation Approach

Systematic Literature Reviews (SLRs) are increasingly popular to categorize and identify research gaps. Their reliability largely depends on the rigour of the attempt to identify, appraise and aggregate evidences through coding, i.e. the process of examining and organizing the data contained in primary studies in order to answer the research questions. Current Qualitative Data Analysis Software (QDAS) lack of a common format. This jeopardizes reuse (i.e. difficult to share coding data among different tools), evolution (i.e. difficult to turn coding data into living documents that evolve as new research is published), and replicability (i.e. difficult for third parties to access and query coding data). Yet, the result of a recent survey indicates that 71,4% of participants (expert SLR reviewers) are ready to share SLR artifacts in a common repository. On the road towards open coding-data repositories, this work looks into W3C's Open Annotation as the way to RDFized those coding data. Benefits include: portability (i.e. W3C's prestige endorses the adoption of this standard among tool vendors); webization (i.e. coding data becomes URL addressable, hence openly reachable), and data linkage (i.e. RDFizing coding data benefit from Web technologies to query, draw inferences and easily link this data with external vocabularies). This paper rephrases coding practices as annotation practices where data is captured as W3C's Open Annotations. Using an open annotation repository (i.e. Hypothes.is), the paper illustrates how this repository can be populated with coding data. Deployability is proven by describing two clients on top of this repository: (1) a write client that populates the repository through a color-coding highlighter, and (2), a read client that obtains a traditional SLR spreadsheets by querying so-populated repositories.