Functional-Based Search for Patent Technology Transfer

Patent literature contains over 70 million patent documents, so the amount of information available to companies and the opportunity to derive business value and market new products from this collection is huge. However, presently an effective information extraction is a difficult task because patentees typically write using their own lexicon, style and strategy in describing their inventions. This paper presents a discussion about open problems and a way to overcome them by a new functional search based on Function-Behaviour-Physical effect-Structure ontology. This ontology is used for a technology transfer activity by patents, with the aim of making users aware of how technologies, not yet exploited in their own field, have already been patented in other domains and exactly for achieving their same desired goal. To reach this objective a multidisciplinary approach is proposed, combining design ontologies with information retrieval tools. A case study has been presented to demonstrate how the conceived framework is strategic to search for patents and automatically classify them according to the proposed ontology.