The proposed project iPATDoc aims to develop new innovative technologies for interactive inspection, alignment, and contrastive analysis of the content of patent material. The technologies are designed to complement the products of the participating SMEs and will be decisive for their competitiveness in the continuously growing and increasingly hotly contested intellectual property protection market in general and in the niche of patent examination and management in particular. The technologies to be developed in iPATDoc will facilitate the work on both a single patent and a collection of patents (contained in a patent data base or obtained, for instance, as a result of a targeted patent search) in that they will allow the user to interactively assess via a novel visual concept map representation: (i) the components of the invention protected by a selected patent, their properties, and their compositional and functional interrelations that are of relevance to the invention; (ii) the compositional and functional interrelations of the components of the invention or of the invention as a whole with inventions in patents referenced by citations; (iii) the relevance of the components computed from the analysis of the independent and dependent claims; (iv) similarity-oriented generalization of components extracted from patents in the given collection with respect to their functionality, material, design, etc.; (v) contrasting components extracted from patents in the given collection with respect to their functionality, material, design, etc.; (vi) temporal, geographic, or thematic concept distributions from patent collections on varying levels of abstraction; (vii) patent priorities in the case that a given patent (application) draws upon a number of existing patents or a patent has been split into several patents; (viii) citations across patents in a given patent collection. The interactive assessment features will be realized as a Visual Analytics application.