Introduction

In recent years we have witnessed explosive growth in scientific and regulatory documents related to the patent system. Relevant information is siloed into many heterogeneous and distributed information sources making it very challenging to retrieve information across multiple sources. In addition, each technical domain involves specific technical jargon and terminological inconsistencies which raises the need for semantic interoperability between the various information sources. This research project aims to address two major issues:

1. System, Structural and Semantic level interoperability amongst multiple information sources in the patent system through the use of several ontologies


2. An Information Retreival framework across multiple heterogeneous domains