Digest VI - November 2016

Introduction

The November publication of the InfoBlog brings another extended issue, the Autumn being quite a busy time for conferences!   The blog provides an overview to new information products, applications and other development in the world of patent information, IP and scientific information. This blog is organised by type of news, so new database or other information sources are all together, interface and functional improvements are together, not by vendor. The blog provides a brief overview of what’s happening in the world of IP information with links to the complete announcements, so you can choose to read in full items of interest.   Also included are patent information meetings and events, company announcements, and activities at the IP offices.  When the IP offices are introducing new search, translation or other tools for search, these will be found in the relevant section. The news which appears in the blog is collated using tracking software created by Deep SEARCH 9. Deep SEARCH 9 provides a fast, fuzzy yet precise method to collate news, meaning more time for review and analysis, less time opening emails.

Patent information - sources, content, search, review and analysis

Database content
No new database content was announced this time round.

Patent search and analysis
Ambercite introduced a new version of its ‘cluster searching’ – allowing users to pull together in a single set documents related by family as well as by citation.  Ambercite’s approach for finding relevant documents uses proprietary algorithms based upon linking three generations of citations in both directions for similarity. The Japan Patent Office published updates to its FI patent classification scheme in November. FI classes can be a useful tool for searching Japanese art. The revised codes are implemented for older documents when these are re-classified. FI classes are more detailed, but based on, IPC, and can be more detailed that CPC in areas of technology in which Japan leads. Minesoft have added a semantic search tool for PatBase. It can be used to supplement a text search, and it replaces the ‘Similarity search ‘ option. And WIPO is busy improving Patent Translate – its machine translation software for Patentscope by adding artificial intelligence functionality. A beta test version is available for Chinese language to English language translations The EPO announced plans to introduce full text searching in espacenet.   A new mobile-friendly interface to access espacenet on the go is also planned.

Subject specific searching – chemistry, maths, life sciences

Another improvement for Patbase is a new thesaurus which combines Minesoft’s chemical Search, language Explorer, and dictionary and thesaurus. It provides another way to find synonyms, keywords, acronyms and translations to search for in PatBase. This makes it easier to refine and extend search strategies as you go. Users of STN now have additional chemical structure drawing options with deuterium (D) and tritium (T) atoms available in the structure editor Common Atoms palette. This allows more precise searches in CAS REGISTRY, DCR and DWPIM.   Searching Greek letters, commonly used in mathematical formulae, and as units, can be performed on STN using the Greek letter, or the word spelt in Latin-alphabet. Using NLP to improve patient selection was demonstrated at a recent Text Mining Summit in the US , organized by Linguamatics.   A hackathon showed how using Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques on the I2E text mining platform can be useful to improve clinical trial design and patient recruitment when accessing data from clinicaltrials.gov and patient records. These two data sets are commonly used when setting up clinical trial.

Post-search export, share, workflow options
Search is just the beginning, most result sets will be examined, refined, and iterated by a ream. In recognition of this Minesoft has introduced a new Export module for PatBase, which can be customised. For instance legal status information can be included and filters for country and date are available. STN / CAS also continue to improve its Export to Excel options for ‘new’ STN.

Analysis and visualisation tools, large scale data sets and value measurements
At the Munich based IP Service World event Mtc showed how to use tableau to analyse large patent data sets, using patent filing information, and patent classifications to create temporal trends analysis and geographical maps to show up regional variations. Methods to find ‘important’ patents , particularly within large database sets, without actually reading the documents are popular, and usually involve some kind of ‘scoring’. Ambercite have developed their own metric – Amberscore.

IP and economics
The second edition of a report first published in 2013 by EPO and EUIPO has been updated. The report looks at all IP rights - patents, trademarks, designs, copyright, geographical indications and plant varieties- and matches them to industries and quantifies the contribution of IPR-intensive industries in the EU. The study found that over 42% or EUR 5.7 trillion is generated by IPR intensive industries.

Scientific literature
12 non-patent literature (usually called scientific literature – outside of the patent information sphere) databases are now available to PatBase users. The sources include Elsevier’s ScienceDirect and Scopus, and Agricola, AGRIS, CiteSeer, Highwire, IEEE, Inspec, science.gov, PubMed, WorldWide Science, Google Scholar, SpringerLink.

News, Announcements, Cooperations from the IP offices.

Asia
The Japan Patent Office published its national statistics on patent, trademark, design and utility model filings updated with 2015 data.

Europe.
The EU unitary patent system is slowly getting nearer to reality, as the UK ‘s Baroness Neville-Rolfe, announced that the UK is planning to ratify the Unitary Patent Court Agreement. This has been subject to doubt since the UK referendum secured a majority to leave the EU on 23 June 2016.

USA
The USPTO issued examples showing how best to draft patent claims in the life science fields of vaccines and diagnostics. The USPTO has revised its examination guidance, after the Myriad and Mayo cases which concerned subject matter eligibility of naturally occurring things.   See Section 101.

International
The World Intellectual Property Organization is making its extensive IP reference collection available under an Open Access policy. This will enable policy-makers, researchers, practitioners and anyone else to use and build upon these resources, sharing knowledge and expertise – one of WIPO’s own goals.   The 5th meeting of the TM5. was held in China in October. It looked at ‘bad-faith’ trademark filings, quality issues arising due to the increase in trademarks filed worldwide. Since 2012, the JPO, EUIPO, KIPO, SAIC and USPTO have discussed cooperation on common issues regarding trademarks and in 2017 a joint meeting will be held with INTA, (the International Trademark Association) and the 2017 TM5 meeting will be hosted by EUIPO. ID5 – The same five offices have started collaborating on industrial design rights with the second meeting held in China in November. The group plan to create a website, to collaborate on priority data, classification methods, and to collect statistics and create user documentation to improve awareness of IPR for designs.

Next month – coming soon
December’s issue will review recent conferences , meetings and events. And round up with a discussion of trends in patent information provision in 2016.