Identifying and Reformulating Knowledge Items to Fit with the Inventive Design Method (IDM) Model for a Semantically-based Patent Mining☆

Abstract The analysis of initial situation is necessary when dealing with the complex engineering situation. Furthermore, innovation is the underlying foundation of technological advances and today's competitive economy. Patents contain important research and it is also possible to find within them a kind of history of the evolution of an artifact. Used effectively, patents can help to provide businesses and individuals work with innovative ideas. In this context, the engineers may very often need to analyze them in order to benefit from the knowledge contained therein to organize their inventive task. However, patents are lengthy and rich in technical terminology; analyzing patents may require a lot of human effort. Thus, automating the process is very timely. To facilitate this, several patent analysis tools have been created. There are also patent analysis tools dedicated to highlighting various values of tools, but very few of them are designed to extract information or knowledge contained in patents. This paper presents an ongoing research on knowledge extraction for the Inventive Design Method (IDM), which extends from TRIZ, the theory of inventive problem solving.