A fact-oriented ontological approach to SAO-based function modeling of patents for implementing Function-based Technology Database

Function-Oriented Search (FOS) has been proposed as a tool for use in searching patent databases to find existing solutions to new problems. To implement FOS effectively, a well-structured Function-based Technology Database (FTDB) is required. An FTDB is a data repository of technology information represented as "function". To implement an FTDB, four features should be addressed: continual data updating, limited area searching, function generalization, and semantics handling. In this paper, we consider these features to suggest a fact-oriented ontological approach to implementing an FTDB by Subject-Action-Object (SAD)based function modeling of patents. The proposed approach uses fact-oriented ontology modeling of SAO structures extracted from patent documents, and implements an FTDB, which is an SAO-based patent retrieval system to support FOS. We also verify the feasibility of the proposed approach to by using it to conduct case studies of patent retrieval. (C) 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.