Ontologies for intellectual property rights protection

Pirating various forms of intellectual property (IP) causes great economic loss to intellectual property rights (IPR) holders. IPR protection is becoming a key issue in our highly networked world. In order to further deepen our understanding of how to protect IPR and enhance information interchange and knowledge sharing among related entities, ontologies for IPR protection are proposed. This study contains three parts, which are developed to deal with different perspectives in this domain. The first part presents a static ontology, i.e. a hierarchy framework for the domain language, including primarily classes of participants, classes of IP works, classes of activities, and relations between these classes. In the second part, a dynamic ontology is shown to illustrate the IPR protection process. Thirdly, a causal map is used to demonstrate how classes of IPR protection methodologies are causally related with classes of IP piracy methodologies. Finally, the case of Tomato Garden is offered to demonstrate how the proposed ontologies are used in the real world. In respect of the ontology, it is first helpful to gain a comprehensive understanding of domain knowledge of IPR protection; second, IPR protection systems' design and development in this domain are facilitated and supported by these ontologies; third, the proposed ontologies are united in the Ontology Web Language (OWL) and the OWL rules languages framework, both of which are machine readable. (C) 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.