Project Details
Projekt
Patents4Science – Development of an Information Infrastructure for the Use of Patent Knowledge in Science (P4SI)
Subject Area
Data Management, Data-Intensive Systems, Computer Science Methods in Business Informatics
Term
since 2022
Project identifier
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 496963457
A large part of the entire technical knowledge of mankind is described in patents. The information contained therein such as description of technical solutions, important substances, methods and processes, etc. have a high value for answering important technological and scientific questions and for developing innovative solutions. Several studies show that this potential remains widely unused and is rarely exploited in scientific context. The reasons are on the one hand the lack of expertise of scientists to research and analyse patents with existing tools, and on the other hand the complexity and structure of patents themselves. Our preliminary user needs and requirements analysis at six research institutes revealed major hurdles and challenges in accessing and searching as well as in the utilisation of patent information in terms of their content. The results clearly show that existing solutions offer considerably limited access to patent information and that there is a lack of semantics descriptions in patent texts that could be exploited to link patent data with scientific literature and other (domain-specific) knowledge sources. With this project, our aim is to build an innovative information infrastructure that is geared towards the exploitation of patents in the sciences - Patents4Science-Information Infrastructure (P4SI). Our aim is to realise (i) a simple, efficient and sustainable access to patents and the knowledge they contain. By means of automatic data analysis and semantic linking based on existing comprehensive knowledge bases such as DbPedia, Wikidata, (ii) the contents of patents will be semantically enriched, indexed and (iii) linked with scientific literature and other domain-specific knowledge sources resulting in a patent-centric knowledge graph (Patent Knowledge Graph). Hereby, the information contained in the textual content of patents will be annotated and linked to semantic entities for better understandability. The conceptual and contextual knowledge required for the annotations can be derived and integrated from freely accessible knowledge bases from the Linked Open Data (LOD) Cloud and domain-specific ontologies. In order to evaluate the planned P4SI, suitable use cases and research questions from the areas of plasma technology, additive manufacturing and battery materials will be addressed. Hence, patent information as a complementary and essential source of scientific and technical knowledge will support fundamental research as well as serve technology development and technology transfer. The planned innovative concept builds on the principles of LOD and FAIR Data, and it is designed for the sustainable use of a new knowledge dimension in the sciences that is expanded to include patent information. In the future, the infrastructure will be extended to other research fields and connected to important initiatives such as NFDI, GAIA-X and EOSC.
DFG Programme
Research data and software (Scientific Library Services and Information Systems)
