Interpreting Design Structure in Patents Using an Ontology Library
Patents contain valuable information for engineering design. However, the increasing number of annual patent publications makes it difficult for any individual designer to assimilate all up-to-date knowledge hidden in patent documents. In this paper, we proposed a computational approach to interpret design structure embedded in patent claims using pre-developed ontology libraries. The study combined natural language processing (NLP) techniques, text data-mining, ontological engineering, and our rule-based tree generation method. Data sources and adopted tools included online patent documents, knowledge gathered from engineering textbooks, WordNet, a part-of-speech tagger developed by the Stanford NLP group, and Graphviz. We showed that the framework proposed in the paper not only could help minimize manual work required for obtaining design structures but also enable automatic dissimilarity comparison between patents.