Requirements-based knowledge discovery for technology management

Exploiting information resources, particularly diverse research and development databases, presents opportunities to enhance technology management. Many such databases (e.g., Science Citation Index, Business Index) offer useful index fields to help access documents. However, these indexes sometimes fail to address the requirements effectively. We present an approach that allows the user to extract and categorize desired information from particular datasets that lack effective indexing for the purpose. We illustrate for a US Patents dataset on lightweight automotive materials.