Abstract
At present, information regarding patents is usually represented and stored in large databases. Information from these databases is commonly retrieved in the form of files with a CSV- or XML-based codification but with little semantics that enable the inference of further relationships among patents. In these databases, each patent is associated with a technological field by a code for a hierarchical classification. Although the codes assume a hierarchical classification approach, inclusion/subsumption relationships are not explicitly specified such that computers can process them automatically. This paper presents an approach to automatically translate the hierarchies found in the patent classification codes into ontologies of concept hi-erarchies. This proposal also enables the automatic inference of implicit knowledge of patent information. A case study is presented to illustrate the applicability of the proposal. © Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2013.