PatentDom: Analyzing Patent Relationships on Multi-View Patent Graphs

The fast growth of technologies has driven the advancement of our society. It is often necessary to quickly grasp the linkage between different technologies in order to better understand the technical trend. The availability of huge volumes of granted patent documents provides a reasonable basis for analyzing the relationships between technologies. In this paper, we propose a unified framework, named PatentDom, to identify important patents related to key techniques from a large number of patent documents. The framework integrates different types of patent information, including patent content, citations of patents, and temporal relations, and provides a concise yet comprehensive technology summary. The identified key patents enable a variety of patent-related analytical applications, e.g., outlining the technology evolution of a particular domain, tracing a given technique to prior technologies, and mining the technical connection of two given patent documents. Empirical analysis and extensive case studies on a collection of US patent documents demonstrate the efficacy of our proposed framework.