Patents4Science - Establishing an Information Infrastructure for the Use of Patent Knowledge in Science

A large part of the technical knowledge of mankind is described in patents. This knowledge, e.g., the description of technical procedures, chemical substances, methods and processes, is of great importance for research on technological and scientific questions and for the development of innovative solutions. Several studies show that the potential of patent knowledge is little recognized and exploited, especially in the scientific context. The reasons for this are, on the one hand, the complexity and structure of the patents themselves and, on the other hand, the lack of expertise to research and analyze them using existing tools. Our preliminary investigations in the context of the needs analysis at six research institutes provided fundamental insights into major hurdles and challenges in accessing and searching as well as in exploiting the content of patents.

Contact

Dr. Hidir Aras

Project management Patents4Science

Phone:

+49 7247 808 306

hidir.aras [at] fiz-karlsruhe.de

Project Information

This challenge is to be met by establishing an innovative information infrastructure - Patents4Science-Information Infrastructure (P4SI) - geared towards the exploitation of patents in the sciences. Overall, the P4SI intends to provide simple, efficient and sustainable access to patents and the knowledge they contain. To this end, the content of patents will be semantically indexed and interoperably linked with scientific literature and other domain-specific knowledge sources in a patent-centric knowledge graph (Patent Knowledge Graph).

The content-related (semantic) linking is to be achieved by means of annotation and linking of semantic entities of the textual content of the data relevant for a research domain. The conceptual knowledge needed for the annotations can be derived and integrated from freely available knowledge bases from the Linked Open Data (LOD) Cloud and domain-specific ontologies. For the evaluation of the planned P4SI, questions from the application-oriented research areas of plasma technology, additive manufacturing and battery materials are to be addressed first. Here, patent information, in addition to scientific literature and research data, represents an essential complementary source of information not only for basic research, but also supports technology development and technology transfer in particular.

The envisaged novel concept builds on the principles of LOD and FAIR Data, and it is designed for the sustainable use of a data space in the sciences extended by patent information. In the future, it will be extended to other domains and connected to initiatives such as NFDI, GAIA-X and EOSC.

An application example from the Leibniz Institute for Plasma Science and Technology (INP) impressively shows how important easy access to patent information is for targeted research and technological innovation: Search queries such as "Which plasma sources can be used to decontaminate room air and generate a physical plasma that reduces SARS-CoV-2 viral load?" could be processes automatically using the knowledge graph-based P4SI approach. This not only enables an acceleration of research and development processes, but ultimately also provides an enormous saving of financial resources and a direct economic and intellectual competitive advantage.

FIZ Karlsruhe's project partners are the Leibniz Institute for Plasma Science and Technology (INP) in Greifswald, the Leibniz Institute for Materials-oriented Technologies - IWT in Bremen, and the INM - Leibniz Institute for New Materials in Saarbrücken. At IWT, the focus is on using patent knowledge to research completely new types of material combinations in additive manufacturing. For example, laser-based 3D printing processes use particles with special physical properties, such as permanent magnets with high field strength, together with alloyed particles specially produced at the institute. Here, patent information is of enormous value for these processes. Furthermore, the rapidly developing field of novel battery materials, energy storage media or even processes for their recycling confronts both research institutions and industrial companies with the problem of having to orientate themselves in a flood of information often rich in synonyms. Therefore, it is of great importance for INM to be able to distinguish its own research from the patent situation as early as possible in order to avoid duplicate research or the risk of affecting already protected patent claims. With the help of the automated information and search tool to be developed, INM expects a simplification and acceleration of its own searches within the defined research environment. In this context, new aspects should open up at an early stage, leading to a time advantage in the exploration of new research fields.

Project Information