Quantifying and formalizing product aspects through patent mining

Like most front-end design methodologies, TRIZ is characterized by the need of an abstraction level to apply the methodology. Users of these methodologies rely on intrinsic skills to map a specific situation to a abstracted one, analyze it through the methodology, and, if applicable, map it back to a specific situation. A methodology and algorithm are proposed that eliminate this subjective and difficult to perform mapping by formalizing automatically identified, fine-grained product dimensions or Aspects. These Aspects can be applied in idea generation and problem solving contexts, e.g. building a function database, performing trends analysis and searching for similar products.