Semantic Patent Information Retrieval and Management with OWL

Patent information is mainly represented and stored in databases containing large amounts of information about the inventions and metadata of patents such as the technological field to which they belong, which can be retrieved in standard formats such as CSV or XML. These, however, provide few semantics to enable further relationships among patents to be inferred for analysis purposes. Ontologies, mostly represented in the Web Ontology Language (OWL), are increasingly being developed to represent, manage and reason about data in information systems. Unfortunately, the current patent ontologies do not seem to fully capture the implicit hierarchies present in patent technology codes to exploit the information that can be derived from the formal representation of patent code classification hierarchies through logic reasoning. This paper presents an approach to automatically index hierarchical codes with ontological categories and enrich the information retrieved and knowledge management from different patent repositories with new relationships, properties and inferred information.