Trends and Applications in Patent Databases for the Blockchain Technology on Use Case : Products Traceability in Food Supply Chain

The paper deals with the analysis of blockchain technology applications in the domain of product traceability in a food supply chain. Patent databases are used as data information sources. Analytical approach uses basic statistical procedures on patent bibliographic data as well as international patent codes (IPC) processed with a term frequency-inverse document frequency algorithm. The analysis, performed on the created patent portfolio, consists of the trend analysis, identification of technologies and application areas and detection of the most valuable patents. The portfolio analysis is used for a better understanding of the directions of applying blockchain technology in food supply chains.