Supporting patent retrieval in the context of innovation-processes by means of information dialogue

Innovations are an essential factor of competition for manufacturing companies in technical industries. Patent information plays an important role for innovation-processes and innovators in the knowledge management. The combination of cross-organizational spread information and resources from patent databases and digital libraries is necessary in order to gain profit for innovation experts. The major challenge is to overcome the current information deficit and to fulfill the information need of the experts in the innovation-process. In this paper we first present in detail three innovation scenarios to derive challenges on advanced information systems which support an information dialogue but also the complete search process. Then we define essential conditions of a search task and from that we derive the elementary information sets and activities in the next step. An example shows the applicability and utility of the formalization described and shows how the activities fill up the user’s information dialogue context. During the formalization we apply a cognitive walk-through on a patent database. We will use the Daffodil-system as an experimental system for further development and evaluation of the above described framework.