Chance discovery in technology monitoring of solar cell using patent data

As the technology of solar cell is growing rapidly, the monitoring of its technological situation becomes crucial for the industry and companies as well as the relevant people nowadays. Meanwhile, the patent data contains abundant technological information from which is worthy of exploring to extract further knowledge. Therefore, a graph-based approach, chance discovery, is employed so as to analyze the patent data, to form the technological scenarios, and to explain the overview of solar cell technology. Finally, several features of solar cell technology have been identified and explained, including the meaningful topics, significant attributes within each individual topic, and relationships between technology and application.