Semantic SAO network of patents for reusability of inventive knowledge

This paper suggests a SAO network for identifying technological opportunities by reusing inventive knowledge of patents. Despite the keyword-based approach's ease of use and simplicity, the approach is not sufficient for addressing the reuse of technological knowledge because it cannot represent how technological components interact with. In response, this paper adopts the concept of function which shows objectives and uses of technological components and relationships among them. The functions that constitute a technology can be extracted in the form of subject-action-object (SAO) structure from their relevant technological documents by exploiting natural language processing. This paper proposes a procedure to construct a network incorporating functional knowledge of patents. Then, methods to explore technological opportunities from the network are presented.