PatentLine: Analyzing Technology Evolution on Multi-View Patent Graphs

The fast growth of technologies has driven the advancement of our society. It is often necessary to quickly grab the evo-lution of technologies in order to better understand the tech-nology trend. The availability of huge volumes of granted patent documents provides a reasonable basis for analyzing technology evolution. In this paper, we propose a unified framework, named PatentLine, to generate a technology evolution tree for a given topic or a classification code related to granted patents. The framework integrates different types of patent information, including patent content, citations of patents, temporal relations, etc., and provides a concise yet comprehensive evolution summary. The generated summary enables a variety of patent-related analyses such as identify-ing relevant prior art and detecting technology gap. A case study on a collection of US patents demonstrates the efficacy of our proposed framework