Abstract
In a knowledge based economy, intangible assets (e.g., intellectual properties and innovative technology) are important to the development of enterprise knowledge capital. Patent aims to encourage and protect the use of invention and creation to promote industrial development under global legal rules and orders. Thus, patents are the most critical means of maintaining legal rights of intellectual properties (IPs). The 2009-2010 global competitiveness report indicates that Switzerland became the most competitive nation in the world, because of its relatively high R&D investment and commercialization. Switzerland‘s per million inhabitants own 148 patents, which is the highest in the world, and the number well reflect the R&D capability of a country. In recent decade, Taiwan industry has also focused on the internationalization of R&D with their foreign patents reaching more than 52.2% of total granted patents (well above global average of 15.41%). The increasing patents, applied and approved, attribute to the higher chance of patent litigation and legal disputes. Furthermore, the cost of patent licensing is also growing rapidly over the recent years. Regardless being plaintiffs or defendants, the concept of patent litigation should be upgraded from passive to active and even proactive level. However, other than available strait forward patent search and meta-analysis IT tools, we still lack advanced analytical and decision support methodology and systems for handling patent litigation and protecting IPs. This research will develop patent ontology engineering approach, the improved overlapping patent clustering method and patent infringement analysis. The ontology engineering approach analyzes patent claims structure and extracts patent characteristics for technical domain schema construction. Further, the research will use the developed methods to implement an analytical and decision support prototyping system to analyze related patents and compare their claim elements based on the patent ontology, infringement rules and facts. After the development of the methodology and system, the research will study well known patent litigation cases (e.g., HTC vs. Apple, LGD vs. AUO) and adopt the proposed methods and prototyping system for the case analysis to demonstrate the effectiveness and applicability of the research solutions toward the real legal matter.