Linking Patents to Knowledge Sources: A Context Matching Technique using Automatic Patent Classification

Patents contain a great deal of technical knowledge and are not easy to understand without in-depth field expertise, or additional supporting materials. We hypothesise that this technical knowledge can be made more accessible to readers, regardless of their level of knowledge in the field of the patent, by linking the patents' content to external knowledge sources. This paper investigates the process of linking patents to external knowledge sources, proposing a novel context matching technique based on an automated patent classification system. The proposed method can improve the precision of the created links, validating the utility of the context match between patent and knowledge source.