FIZ Special Corona: Applying Semantic Technologies for Knowledge Discovery from Patents – a case study for the COVID-19 pandemic

Part I: Semantic Search and Deep Patent Text Analysis

In the last decades, an increasing number of scientific publications and patents has been published worldwide, which constitute an essential resource for aiding current drug research and helping the development of innovative methods and applications in the fight against novel diseases. With regard to SARS-CoV-2 and patents related to other events of coronavirus outbreaks, especially SARS-COV-1 and MERS, can be particularly helpful as a resource for gaining new insights during the development of new methods of treatment against COVID-19.

Finding and exploiting knowledge in patent texts is a difficult task, since in addition to the application of classical patent search techniques, a high intellectual effort to analyse hundreds to thousands of patent documents is required. FIZ Karlsruhe has started to research and develop new methods for searching and analysing collections of patent information and scientific texts by employing enhanced methods for semantic search and analysis. Especially for scientists who are not trained in manually searching and evaluating a significant amount of patent documents using classical patent retrieval approaches, the complexity and learning curve for the use of such analysis tools can be reduced significantly.

Read the complete case study "Applying Semantic Technologies for Knowledge Discovery from Patents – a case study for the COVID-19 pandemic" written by Hidir Aras, Project Leader TDM, FIZ Karlsruhe. (Part I, PDF)

FIZ Special Corona