Utilization of Bio-Ontologies for Enhancing Patent Information Retrieval

The ability to access existing patents and patent-related information can have significant impacts on technology development and commercial markets. While such information is now available online, requesting the information about a specific technology remains a nontrivial task. The reason is that the online information often resides in different storage sources, is based on different modeling paradigms, and is managed by different independent entities. Ontology is one modeling paradigm that can capture semantically rich knowledge about a specific domain and its existing patents. That knowledge can be used to facilitate information sharing and information interoperability. This paper focuses on the bio-medical domain, where numerous patents have been filed in recent years. Specifically, this paper describes a computational framework that can facilitate the retrieval of intellectual property (IP-) related information in the biomedical domain