WikiLink: an encyclopedia-based semantic network for design innovation

Data-driven design and innovation is a process to reuse and provide valuable and useful information. However, existing semantic networks for design innovation is built on data source restricted to technological and scientific information. Besides, existing studies build the edges of a semantic network only on either statistical or semantic relationships, which is less likely to make full use of the benefits from both types of relationships and discover implicit knowledge for design innovation. Therefore, we constructed WikiLink, a semantic network based on Wikipedia. Combined weight which fuses both the statistic and semantic weights between concepts is introduced in WikiLink, and four algorithms are developed for inspiring new ideas. Evaluation experiments are undertaken and results show that the network is characterised by high coverage of terms, relationships and disciplines, which proves the network's effectiveness and usefulness. Then a demonstration and case study results indicate that WikiLink can serve as an idea generation tool for innovation in conceptual design. The source code of WikiLink and the backend data are provided open-source for more users to explore and build on.

Patent-KG: A Patent Knowledge Graph for Engineering Design

To facilitate the knowledge reuse in engineering design, several dataset approaches have been proposed and applied by designers. This paper builds a patent-based knowledge graph, patent-KG, to represent the knowledge facts in patents for engineering design. The arising patent-KG approach proposes a new unsupervised mechanism to extract the knowledge facts in patent, by searching the attention graph in language models. This method avoids using expensive labelled data in supervised learning or listing complex syntactic rules in rule-based extraction. The extracted entities are compared with other benchmarks and shows a higher coverage of engineering words. The extracted relationships are also compared with other benchmarks, and the result shows meaningful advantages.