We live in a world of information explosion. The phenomenal growth of the Internet has resulted in the availability of huge amounts of online information. Hence, the ability to find desired information is highly desirable, but manual extraction of desired documents is very costly and time consuming. Thus, the automation of systems for documents retrieval, especially for commercial use, is in great demand.
Among all the documents freely disposable on the web, patents are sources of technical and strategic information. In fact, according to the European Patent Office “patents reveal solutions to technical problems, and they represent an inexhaustible source of information: more than 80 percent of man's technical knowledge is described in patent literature”. That's why patents are used as sources more than other documents.
The goal of this research activity is to create a semi-automatic system for supporting companies and academic research in documents retrieval to gather desired knowledge. Methodologies for the construction of thesauri, processes for query expansion and algorithms for documents extraction, categorization and clustering have been developed in this study. The core of the work consists of the KOM®, a Knowledge Organizing Module suitable for classifying and organizing information in a hierarchical and dynamic way. The purpose of this module is to provide a list of keywords for searching documents.
KOM® is a computer aided module, thus computer guides the user during the selection of input keywords, while the generation of keywords and the algorithm for documents extraction are fully automatic. Currently, the algorithm aims to build the state of the art of a given product or technology, highlighting the most interesting systems of competitors (figure below).
KOM® has been invented with the intention of using also for many other activities, such as problem solving, finding alternative problems, technological transfer or forecasting, supporting prior art searches, extracting information to create a knowledge base. The integration is under development.
KOM® is under patent pending and it has been presented in the following articles:
Russo D., Montecchi T.,: “Creativity techniques for a Computer Aided Inventing System”, submitted to International Conference On Engineering Design, ICED, 2011;
Russo D., Montecchi T.,: “A Function-Behaviour Oriented Search for patent digging”, submitted to International Design Engineering Technical Conferences & Computers and Information in Engineering Conference, ASME, 2011.
AN APPLICATION OF KOM® FOR BUILDING A STATE OF THE ART: A PIECE OF THE S.O.A FOR A WATERPURIFIER IS REPRESENTED.
