Developing an ontology for the U.S. patent system

The past few years have experienced an explosive growth in scientific and regulatory documents related to the patent system. Relevant information is siloed into many heterogeneous information domains making it a challenging task to gather information. In this paper, we develop an ontology to standardize the representation of the patent system in order to overcome the heterogeneity and integrate information from the patent document, court case and file wrapper domains. Through a use case in the bio domain erythropoietin, we demonstrate how this ontology can be used as a tool to improve the learning curve of users gathering information across these multiple information domains. The proposed ontology provides the required semantics to develop automated tools for a variety of purposes including Information Retrieval (IR) and analytics.

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