Digest XI - September 2017

This month’s edition of the blog provides news from China (PIAC meeting), a new website from the DPMA, new releases of software from Linguamatics and Patbase, and much more. The blog is created using deepSearch9’s news tracking software, and this month we collected over 100 news stories published from 60 organisations to bring you this synopsis of the latest happenings in the wider patent information industry. Click on the links to go to the original articles and find out more.

News from the offices – websites, content and classification matters
The JPO revised a list of 114 technical fields from the FI classification scheme where re-classifications are planned. The new scheme should be available in November. The scheme is revised bi-annually in April and November. Reviewing new and changing FI classifications can provide a useful indicator of technology advances in Japan.   From December the IPI (Swiss Federal Institute of Intellectual Property ) will begin classifying Swiss patent applications using CPC (Cooperative Patent Classifications) which will be added in addition to any CPCs added by the EPO on related applications, and the CPCs will not be published on the applications nor will they appear in SwissReg.  

An interesting news item from SIPO this month announced that the IPR information system for the national defence industry is online, containing documentation of the military patents filed since 1985.   There is also a database of military use software copyrights.   The DPMA (German Patent and Trade Mark Office) introduced a new website (in English and German) with improved graphics and functionality suitable for use on mobile platforms. The ‘Services’ menu presents legal information on IPR filing and fees, and the ‘Search’ menu links to the DPMA databases and services.

Bilateral and other meetings hosted by the patent offices. (EPO, JPO, SIPO, WIPO)
The EPO released a synopsis of their ‘Role of patents in advancing climate change mitigation technologies’ (CCMT) conference/ event held in Athens in September. From the patent information perspective a classification tag is added to patents aimed at renewable energy technologies, and it is good to see the brief extended to include other technologies at this event.  

The JPO reported on two bi-lateral meetings the first was with SIPO for a discussion on designs and with the EUIPO on trademarks.   Both meetings discussed trends, examination and quality. JPO and SIPO held the 7th Design meeting in late August to share information on design registration system and examination practice, including The Hague agreement, and industrial design forum. The 7th Trademark Experts Meeting held between JPO and EUIPO shared information on trademark trends, examination and quality management.   A review of the ‘Memorandum of Cooperation‘ (MOC) took place between Japan’s JPO and India’s DIPP (Department of Industrial Policy and Promotion), the agreement was originally filed in 2015 to encourage cooperation in the field of industrial property between the two countries, and has been renewed this year, one aim is to enable the growing number of Japanese companies filing for IP in India to obtain protection earlier.   The MOC covers training of ’ CGPDTM’ (India) new examiners, sharing examination practices, information such as gazettes and journals and raising IP awareness. SIPO signed a ‘Memorandum of Understanding’ with the Government of the Republic of Tajikistan for cooperation on IP activities. A WIPO team led by Yoshiyuki Takagi, Assistant Director General, met with SIPO Deputy Commissioner for discussions on patent data exchange and international patent classification matters.

Each September the PIAC meeting takes place in Beijing. This year was the 8th meeting, and the largest so far with 4,000 participants, 76 exhibitors and 78 speakers over two days. The event was opened by SIPO Commissioner Shen Chengyu. The conferences theme was; “Patent, Driving the Growth of Real Economy” and featured plenary presentations, breakout sessions and exhibitor workshops providing an overview of the patent information industry in China, and a look at the future with AI implementations from Patsnap, and Patentics, and a look at how to file patents to protect AI methodologies from UNIUS. Another theme was licensing, SEPs, and collaborations, particularly important as Industry 4.0 innovations continue apace.

Legislative
The Unitary Patent moved two steps closer as Lithuania and Estonia both ratified the Treaty. However, the UK and Germany both seem far from ratification, so it is still unclear when the UPC may come into being. It looks unlikely to be early in 2018 now.

Patent Analytics
PatBase Analytics version 2 was released in September, bringing faster analysis of more data, and extended charting, e.g. 3d views.   IFI Claims Patent Services has introduced two indicators to help patent analysts get more accurate data on patent expiries, and to work out if a patent is ‘in force’ …….or not.   Legal status indicators are provided for US, EPO, German, Canadian, Japanese, UK, French and Spanish patent office data by IFI..

Text mining / text analytics/ NLP
Linguamatics introduced a new version of I2E (5.1) bringing additional power and allowing improvements for queries created. A "fuzzy matching" approach enables spellings variants, OCR (optical character recognition) errors, and accents in words to be retrieved. Users can also carry out their own ‘data normalization’ prior to building queries for instance for numeric ranges.

Chemistry and Medical information
STN announced that the CHEMLIST (Regulated Chemicals Listing) database now lists chemicals from the Taiwan Chemical Substance Inventory (TCSI).   Organisations in Taiwan must comply with regulations under the Toxic Chemical Substances Control Act, which was introduced in 1986 and has undergone several revisions. 91,000 substances are covered, and registrants include manufacturers of new substances and importers of substances.   EMTREE, Elsevier’s life sciences hierarchical classification scheme (ontology) has been revised for the third time in 2017, and is integrated within EMBASE on STN with 2,740 terms added since the May 2017 release. Only 115 of these are drug terms, the majority are cell line names (approx.. 2,000) and medical device trade names (approx. 670).  

Commercial information and IP services company news.
Minesoft have appointed the Intellectual Property Publishing House Co., Ltd (IPPH) as a new distributor for Patbase in China. Minesoft have distributors in many countries including Argentina and Isreal.   The IPPH, founded in 1980, is the legal publisher for Chinese patent literature under SIPO, and is co-organiser of PIAC meeting.   MultiLing, a global patent translation company, appointed a new Sales VP – Jim Watson in September. Averbis announced its participation in a medical informatics research project over four years from 2018 providing text analytics expertise for unstructured data.   .

Forthcoming User Meetings
Patbase, STN, and Questel all have announced training and user meetings in the Autumn in various European cities, whilst October sees the Linguamatics Text Mining Summit in the USA.   The next issue will be reporting on the EPO PIC meeting in Sofia – the largest patent information in Europe, hosted by the EPO and the Bulgarian Patent Office.