15. The method of claim 12 further comprising identifying potential licensee targets by comparing said overall similarity and said patent similarity using said assignee classification.
12. A method for use with a group of patents retrieved from a data warehouse, the group of retrieved patents related to a given seed patent from an originating industry, the method comprising: extracting a set of similar patents from said group of retrieved patents, each of said similar patents associated with said given seed patent using a statistical method; classifying said given seed patent and said set of similar patents by at least one of assignees and industries; generating an industry taxonomy for said given seed patent and said set of similar patents using at least one of a structured feature and an unstructured feature; mapping assignees of said similar patents to related industries using said industry taxonomy; computing the overall similarity between said originating industry and said related industries; and computing patent similarity between said seed patent and patents assigned to said related industries.