Patent ID: 7536357

Claim:
A method for identifying potential licensee markets for use with at least one seed document describing a technical concept suitable for licensing; the method comprising: performing at least one of a search operation and a query operation of a data warehouse that includes at least one of documents and information about documents relevant to said seed document utilizing at least one term selected from word or text entered into a structured or a non-structured field, wherein said at least one seed document is selected from the group consisting of: patents, trademarks, copyrights, and trade secrets; retrieving a set of intellectual property documents from said data warehouse, each intellectual property document having a statistical similarity to said seed document; classifying said set of intellectual property documents into a plurality of categories using at least one of words analysis, bag of words analysis, phrases analysis, structured features, and unstructured features, wherein each said seed documents and each of the intellectual property documents appear in only one category; representing said categories as a mathematical model wherein a category is represented by a centroid determined as a mean of features of the documents in said category; determining a measure of cohesion and distinctiveness for each of said categories, wherein said measure of distinctiveness is determined as a distance between two closest centroid neighbors; altering said categories based on said measure of distinctiveness wherein categories having a value less than a predetermined level of said measure of distinctiveness are merged with another category; identifying assignee information from said documents; constructing a contingency table that includes a listing of said assignee information for each of said document categories, wherein a value associated with an assignee and category represents a number of intellectual property documents matching said corresponding assignee and category, providing an indication of said values exceeding an expected value, said expected value being determined as a function of a number of intellectual property documents associated with a category, a number of intellectual property documents associated with an assignee and a total number of documents, wherein said indication is further adjusted based on a level of exceeding said expected value; and identifying documents, based on said indication, within a particular one of said document categories so as to identify at least one potential licensee of said technical concept described in said seed document; and making said identification of at least one potential licensee available to a user.