Patent knowledge has been primarily used in an industrial and commercial context. However, access to this knowledge for researchers in science as well its exploitation for the benefit of society is a difficult and challenging endeavor. As a result, a large part of the opportunities that arise from the use of patent information in order to infer new knowledge remains unused. This fact leads to reduced innovation and competitiveness, loss of quality and missing impulses for technology transfer in the international scientific and economic world.
To investigate the need for patent knowledge and its potential use in research, FIZ Karlsruhe, in cooperation with the Leibniz Institute for Plasma Science and Technology e.V. (INP) in Greifswald, conducted a needs analysis by utilizing online surveys at several Leibniz institutes, which confirmed the need for patent knowledge in research and identified major obstacles and gaps.
Based on this, the "Patents4Science" project, www.patents4science.org, funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG), will create over the next 3 years a patent-centric knowledge graph based on Linked Open Data, as well as a modern information infrastructure for linking patent knowledge with scientific literature and other domain-specific information. As an initial step, the Patent Knowledge Graph integrates domain-specific knowledge from three areas: plasma technology, additive manufacturing and battery materials. The Patents4Science infrastructure will allow scientists to easily access and make use of essential information in patents such as descriptions of technical processes and devices, properties of materials and active pharmaceutical ingredients, and details of specific biomedical processes. As a result, researchers will gain access to new approaches and solutions, experiments or technical specifications that haven’t been published elsewhere via dedicated (semantic) information services.
More information is available at www.patents4science.org
Contacts
FIZ Karlsruhe:
Dr. Hidir Aras, Patent & Scientific Information
hidir.aras@fiz-karlsruhe.de
Leibniz-INP:
Dr. Markus Becker, Plasma Modeling and Data Science
markus.becker@inp-greifswald.de
Leibniz-IWT:
Dr.-Ing. Norbert Riefler, Process Engineering
riefler@iwt.uni-bremen.de
Leibniz-INM:
Dr. Carsten Becker-Willinger, INM Innovation Center
carsten.becker-willinger@leibniz-inm.de