Ontology matching for patent classification

Interdisciplinary research and development projects in medical engineering bene t from well selected collaboration partners. The process of nding such partners from often unfamiliar elds is di cult, but can be supported by an expert pro le that is based on patent analysis and classifying the patents to competence elds in medical engineering. Patent analysis and categorization are di cult and require the analysis of the semantic content. Hence, we propose a twofold approach using a large controlled vocabulary, a smaller competence eld ontology, and an alignment between them to assign patents to a certain competence eld. The approach has two parts: a Topic Map approach and a Publication approach. We evaluate these approaches and its components in several ways. Furthermore, we compare four di erent ways to assign a patent to a competence eld and show that the semantic wealth of a large biomedical ontology is bene cial to the classi cation task.