공통특허분류 분석을 활용한 안전기술융합분야 탐색 : Association Rule Mining(ARM) 접근법

As the safety fields are expanding to a variety of industrial fields, safety technology has been developed by convergence between industrial safety fields such as mechanics, ergonomics, electronics, chemistry, construction, and information science. As the technology convergence is facilitating recently advanced safety technology, it is important to explore the trends of safety technology for understanding which industrial technologies have been integrated thus far. For studying the trends of technology, the patent is considered one of the useful sources that has provided the ample information of new technology. The patent has been also used to identify the patterns of technology convergence through various quantitative methods. In this respect, this study aims to identify the convergence patterns and fields of safety technology using association rule mining(ARM)-based patent co-classification(co-class) analysis. The patent co-class data is especially useful for constructing convergence network between technological fields. Through linkages between technological fields, the core and hub classes of convergence network are explored to provide insight into the fields of safety technology. As the representative method for analyzing patent co-class network, the ARM is used to find the likelihood of co-occurrence of patent classes and the ARM network is presented to visualize the convergence network of safety technology. As a result, we find three major convergence fields of safety technology: working safety, medical safety, and vehicle safety.