Applying BPANN and hierarchical ontology to develop a methodology for binary knowledge document classification and content analysis

Nowadays many companies rely on patent engineers to search patent documents and offer recommendation and advice to R&D engineers. Given the great number of patent documents, new means to effectively and efficiently identify and manage the technology-specific patent documents are required. This research applies back-propagation artificial neural network (BPANN), a hierarchical ontology, and Normalized term frequency (NTF) method for binary document classification and content analysis. This approach helps to minimize inappropriate patent document classification. Hence, the approach reduces the effort to search and select patents for analysis. Finally, this paper use the design of exposure machines as a case study to illustrate and verify the efficacy of the approach proposed in this paper. © 2010 IEEE.