Abstract
Some countries have put their efforts into developing offshore wind power (OWP), particularly when the countries are surrounded with coastlines. Taiwan, being an island, has also stated to explore the opportunities and solutions in installing OWP. This research emphasizes on systematically studying OWP technology innovations by dynamically extracting and analyzing patent trends from global patent databases. All related OWP patents are searched, collected and analyzed using advanced text and data mining techniques. First, the research constructs an OWP ontology to identify the OWP technological structure and the core concepts. Then, the OWP ontology is enhanced using frequently appeared key phrases text mined from patent documents and verified by domain experts. The research uses some indicators in order to select the important patents. For instance, the patent types, the patent ages, claims, IPC codes, and assignee types are among the indicators for identifying higher quality OWP patents. The technology and functional distributions of these important patents are mapped out OWP innovations. Both OWP's technology life cycle and technology-function matrix are analyzed. The leading OWP and their technology niches are studied. The potentials and opportunities of OWP development can be clearly identified in specific sub-domains with reliable measures. The research hopes to help Taiwan’s OWP firms promote their competitive technologies with the comparative patent analytic results.