Graph-based managing and mining of processes and data in the domain of intellectual property

Digitalization of knowledge work in communication-intensive domains such as intellectual property protection poses great challenges but also opportunities to improve today’s working environments. The legal domain is strongly characterized by knowledge work, whereby, despite a common legal framework, creativity of individual experts is decisive. This knowledge-intensive work deals with a great amount of data objects, not only as a working basis, but also as a result. While experts heavily follow individual working styles, they still rely on a vast amount of administrative tasks, which are carried out by the supporting staff. These tasks are expected to be performed regularly, reliably and without errors, despite necessary adjustments to the current case and the changing legal framework. Today, knowledge work and administrative tasks are typically supported by different tools that are hardly integrated. Therefore, the tracing of continuous work processes based on exchanged data objects is a great challenge. This traceability is crucial, not only for legal security reasons, but also to enable mining and learning of applicable knowledge about processes. In this paper, we propose a bottom-up approach, which applies a continuously evolving graph of integrated data objects and tasks to model and store static and dynamic aspects of administrative as well as knowledge work, and test the approach in a real-world setting in the domain of intellectual property. We further present initial results of a novel dependency-based mining approach to learn data-dependent task sequences in the graph-based model and discuss several methods for enabling privacy-preserving sharing and mining.