Forecasting renewable energy technologies in desalination and power generation using taxonomies

Renewable Energy (RE) technologies are increasingly viewed as crucially important. Knowledge that helps to predict the likely growth of emergent technologies is essential for well-informed technology management. The vast amount of available data in publications hinders the acquisition and analysis of this knowledge. Therefore, there is a need for intelligent search techniques capable of grouping semantically similar concepts together, such that, for example, terms containing "photovoltaic" are hierarchically subsumed under solar energy-related technologies. Consequently, articles related to "Photovoltaics" should be included in the analysis. To accommodate this in an automated fashion, the authors deploy a renewable energy taxonomy for comprehensive trend discovery in publications and patents. This taxonomy is based on the hierarchical structure of Wikipedia categories and their subordinate Wikipedia terms. This paper analyzes promising trends of renewable energy sources in two case studies: power generation and desalination techniques.