Patents are an important economic factor in today’s globalized markets.
Therefore, the analysis of patent information has become an
inevitable task for a variety of interest groups. The retrieval of relevant
patent information is an integral part of almost every patent
analysis scenario. Unfortunately, the complexity of patent material
inhibits a straightforward retrieval of all relevant patent documents
and leads to iterative, time-consuming approaches in practice.
With ‘PatViz’, a new system for interactive analysis of patent
information has been developed to leverage iterative query refinement.
PatViz supports users in building complex queries visually
and in exploring patent result sets interactively. Thereby, the visual
query module introduces an abstraction layer that provides uniform
access to different retrieval systems and relieves users of the burden
to learn different complex query languages. By establishing an
integrated environment it allows for interactive reintegration of insights
gained from visual result set exploration into the visual query
representation. We expect that the approach we have taken is also
suitable to improve iterative query refinement in other Visual Analytics
systems.
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