Software Tools for Analyzing Patents

http://www.piug.org/pattools.php
From my understanding, this analysis can be divided into two broad categories. These are data mining (or mapping) and text mining. Data mining involves the extraction of fielded data and the analysis thereof. An example would be if someone wanted to examine the relationship between patent assignees and International Patent Classification codes for a specific area of technology. Mining or mapping this information can give someone an idea of who are the major players in a technology area and what type of work they are generally focusing on. When using Derwent data, a similar analysis can be done replacing IPC codes with Derwent manual codes.

Text mining or mapping typically involves clustering or categorizing documents based on the major concepts that are contained within. The data source is unstructured text data, it is not fielded and the only structure is that which the author has applied when they wrote the document and built relationships between different concepts within. An example of this would be if you collected patents from a specific patent assignee and you analyzed the text of these documents. In a cluster map the software would extract the major concepts found within and create clusters of documents that appear to cover the same concept. The software would then visualize these clusters in some fashion creating a map. By looking at the clusters that were created (and subsequently the documents themselves, but now with an organized method) you can quickly get a general idea of the concepts that this organization is working on and how they interrelate.