Ontology Engineering Patents: Who Leads, Where the Gaps Are 2026
Ontology Engineering and Reasoning Patents: Mapping the Field
31.2% concentration. The five most active assignees hold 149 of 478 records in scope — a field with real concentration at the top but a long tail below it. Filings ran from 14 in 2017 up to a peak of 31 in 2019, then eased. The clearest complete-year signal is the drop from 12 filings in 2021 to 7 in 2024, a 42% decline — a real cooling in new filing activity rather than a data artefact, since both years are fully published.
- 1ADVANCED ELEMENTAL TECHNOLOGIES INC48
- 2INTERNATIONAL BUSINESS MACHINE CORPORATION34
- 3HARRIS CORP26
- 4ACCENTURE GLOBAL SOLUTIONS LTD22
- 5CAE USA INC19
See the full ontology engineering and reasoning analysis in Eureka
- The complete ranking, not just the top five
- Every IPC branch with its share of the corpus
- The most-cited records, and where claim space is still thin
Common questions on this landscape
How many patents exist for ontology engineering and reasoning?
This dataset identifies 478 patent records in scope, covering filings from 2015 through the partial 2026 year that combine an ontology engineering or rule-based inference claim with consistency checking, ontology alignment, schema versioning or a related maintenance mechanism. Because publication lags filing by roughly 18 months, the 2025 and 2026 counts are undercounted and will rise as more filings publish. The last fully complete year in the trend is 2024.
Who are the leading patent holders in ontology engineering?
The assignee ranking covers 100 companies across the 478 records in scope, with one clear leader holding 48 records — more than double the fifth-place holder’s 19. The top five assignees combined account for 31.2% of all records, and the top ten for 42.3%, leaving a substantial long tail of companies and individual inventors with only a handful of filings each. That means competitive monitoring in this field cannot rely on watching a single incumbent alone.
Is patent filing in ontology engineering growing or slowing?
Filing activity peaked in 2019 at 31 records and has since cooled: complete-year data shows a drop from 12 filings in 2021 to 7 in 2024, a 42% decline over that span. This is a genuine pullback in new claim activity rather than a data artefact, since both years are fully published. Readers should not draw the same conclusion from 2025 or 2026 figures, which are still filling in due to publication lag.
Disclaimer. This analysis is based on Patsnap Eureka data drawn from a limited snapshot of global patent records and is provided for general information and reference only. Patent data carries inherent limitations — recent filings are under-counted because of publication lag, counts may be on a record or family basis, classification and applicant-name data may contain errors or duplicates, and the underlying search query defines the scope shown — so the analysis may be incomplete or inaccurate and may not reflect the full technology landscape.
Nothing here is an exhaustive prior-art, novelty, freedom-to-operate or validity search, nor does it constitute legal, financial or professional advice, and it should not be relied upon as such. Verify independently and review with qualified patent and legal professionals before acting on it.
Method: Filing trend and technology composition. Derived from a Patsnap search on Ontology Engineering and Reasoning covering 2015–2026, data cut-off 2026-07-31. Counts reflect published records only and shift as new filings publish. Every share divides by all records in scope. Data: Patsnap Eureka. See the full landscape report.