Digest. XIX     August  - October 2018

Welcome to this edition of the InfoBlog!  I hope you enjoy catching up with all the patent, IP, science, and technical information news. I’m writing this just before heading off to the EPO patent information conference where I am looking forward to meeting new entrants and finding out about all the new product developments for patent search, which I will report on next time. Highlights in this edition are the acquisition of MultiLing by Questel, and we await news of the new espacenet at the EPO PIC conference and the address by Antonio Campos the new president of the EPO.   This edition of the information industry news covers items published from August to October 2018.

Section I: Patent, scientific and legal information: content, search tools and analytics

Content
Minesoft’s Patbase and Patbase Express have added full text patent documents from Estonia, Iceland, Turkey, Croatia, Czech Republic, Romania, Ukraine, Serbia, Italy, Cyprus. - bringing the full text collection to 60 authorities.   PatSeer reached 53 full text authorities in October, and added litigation case information from Darts IP. Patbase have also linked up with Darts IP to provide access to their patent litigation information. Patbase customers will gain enhanced legal status information to inform validity, and competitor intelligence decision making.

Search
DWPIM is now available on STNext as a structure-based database with over 2.1 million Markush structures.     The structures are selected from 890,000 Derwent World Patents Index® documents. DWPIM chemical patent data which comes from 33 patenting authorities and is updated 82 times a year with structures of organic, organometallic, inorganic compounds, polymers and plastics, and partially defined structures. Competitive intelligence is important no matter what industry you are active in, and Northern Light has used Google’s Open Source TensorFlow Machine Learning technology, which was released in 2016, to create SinglePoint for its clients who need to assess large volumes of full text market research information. Full article is in Online Searcher 31/08/2018, Competitive Intelligence Portals for the 21st Century, By Keiser, Barbie E.   The JPO has published the FI term revision information, which will be reflected in databases in due course, and on the J-Plat Pat search engine.

User Interface PatSeer is now available with a German language interface, and has added an export format for Vantage PointOrganising results is just as important as finding them and  BizInt Smart Charts have created a new display format for chemical structures. The new format takes a structure based approach. It was announced at the ACS meeting in August 2018. Linguamatics improved their hit-term highlighting in Excel by keeping colours consistent across columns.

Analytics
PatSeer 360 – a new product from Gridlogics was launched in October. PatSeer 360  integrates scoring models with over 40 parameters, and taxonomies to enable users to identify technology trends in their patent data. PatSeer 360 combines business and legal data into a dashboard approach. Another new tool from Gridlogics – VizMAP is available for semantic analysis of large patent data sets.

Section II IP matters

IP Inter office meetings and agreements

Japan Patent Office (JPO) and India Patent Office agreed to start a bilateral ‘PPH’ pilot programme during 2019. They will also cooperate in IT and IP awareness, and conducted discussions on making the India Traditional Knowledge Digital Library part of PCT minimum documentation.   The JPO – and KIPO are cooperating to publish a Concordance List of similar Trademark group codes, around 46,000 goods and services are included on the list.

IP Individual office news

The US PTAB (Patent Trial and Appeal Board) publishes regular information and statistics on Trials and Appeals held. AWA noted that Apple filed the highest number of petitions in the first 6 months of 2018, with Samsun and LG in second place.

Section III: Company news, M&A, People news

In September Klaus Kater, MD of deepSEARCH9 – which is the engine behind this Blog – gave an acclaimed talk at Semantics 2018 in Vienna. Klaus explained how machine learning can combine with data gathering to create a classification tool for CI (competitive intelligence) purposes.  PatentGate turned 10 and to celebrate published information on developing products and services for legal status, analytics and patent watching. ProQuest’s Ex Libris acquired *Research Ltd.  * Research Ltd was founded in 1994 to provide information on funding opportunities. It’s customers are in the UK, New Zealand, Australia and Europe. Questel acquired MultiLing – adding patent translations to its portfolio of IP management and IP search capabilities.

Timothy Neely, recently from KPMG, was appointed MD in Japan for Clarivate Analytics. Clarivate Analytics awarded to Dr. Orion Penner the 2018 Eugene Garfield Award for Innovation in Citation Analysis. This award was launched in 2017 to recognise innovations in the field. Dr. Orion Penner has proposed a method, based on forward and backward citation networks of assessing whether a publication represents a ’pivot’ from old to new ideas.