What About the Data? A Mapping Study on Data Engineering for AI Systems

AI systems cannot exist without data. Now that AI models (data science and AI) have matured and are readily available to apply in practice, most organizations struggle with the data infrastructure to do so. There is a growing need for data engineers that know how to prepare data for AI systems or that can setup enterprise-wide data architectures for analytical projects. But until now, the data engineering part of AI engineering has not been getting much attention, in favor of discussing the modeling part. In this paper we aim to change this by perform a mapping study on data engineering for AI systems, i.e., AI data engineering. We found 25 relevant papers between January 2019 and June 2023, explaining AI data engineering activities. We identify which life cycle phases are covered, which technical solutions or architectures are proposed and which lessons learned are presented. We end by an overall discussion of the papers with implications for practitioners and researchers. This paper creates an overview of the body of knowledge on data engineering for AI. This overview is useful for practitioners to identify solutions and best practices as well as for researchers to identify gaps.