We developed a "patent mining" tool for our company utilizing XML. Corporate
leaders wanted to provide company-wide browser access to our corporate patent
portfolio as well as in-depth analysis of our patent data. They saw this as a
way to assist our company in strategic and investment decisions and to
encourage innovation and collaboration.
The highly structured format of patent data led easily to a hierarchical
representation in XML. The use of XML made programming simpler. We only had
to load the XML document containing the patents into a browser, so there was
no need to extract from a database. In addition, we were able to present the
same XML data in multiple ways, using various XSL stylesheets. XML provided a
very straightforward, inexpensive, and effective way to meet this requirement
for patent mining.
Packaged software is available that imposes structure on... (more)