An ontology-based collaboration recommender system using patents

Successful research and development projects start with finding the right partners for the venture. Especially for interdisciplinary projects, this is a difficult task as experts from foreign domains are not known. Furthermore, the transfer of knowledge from research into practice is becoming more important in research projects to enable the quick application of research results. This is in particular relevant for projects in medical engineering. Patents and publications contain technical knowledge which can be exploited to find suitable experts. Patents are usually more product-oriented as the inventors have to describe an application area and products might be protected by patents. On the other hand, scientific publications represent the state-of-the-art in research. The challenge is finding the right mixture of research- or application-oriented experts from different domains. Hence, we propose a recommender system for experts for a certain topic based on patent topic clustering, ontologies, and ontology matching, which maps patents to corresponding innovation fields. The medical engineering domain serves as a first test bed, since projects in this area are highly interdisciplinary.