The latest statistics from WIPO show that the hubs for worldwide innovation have shifted: China, Japan and Korea are all among the top five biggest patenting nations; more than 50% of new patent publications worldwide appear in Chinese, Japanese or Korean. This means that Asian data represents a major part of worldwide prior art documentation and that patent information users have to meet the challenge of retrieving this documentation effectively and efficiently. How are users coping with a plurality of number formats, varying publication stages, different document types and kind codes? How are patent offices and database producers dealing with ever-growing patent data collections. Are there ways of collaborating on standardising and simplifying patent documentation to make life easier for patent information users and data producers alike?
This discussion round will ask participants what challenges they face when working with Asian patent documentation and what hurdles they have to overcome. The aim will be to identify ways of simplifying the use of Asian patent documents for patent searchers and of retrieving these documents more efficiently.
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3 Comments
Christina writes on Feb 22, 2009 12:08:31 PM
The idea is to present first Asian patent documentation from the user’s point of view, giving an overview which services/databases we normally use and which difficulties we have in searching and receiving documents. In the following breakout session all attendees will have the opportunity to raise questions, set priorities or make proposals in close exchange and discussion with experts (EPO, hosts, and database providers) in order to find ways to standardize and simplify Asian patent documentation.
I would like to ask you for your input, related questions and examples to demonstrate the importance and complexity of this topic by sending your reply directly via this forum or by bringing along to the workshop. Thank you!
Tania writes on Mar 17, 2009 12:23:03 PM
Dear All,
My name is Tania Malmierca and I work at the EPO, in the Directorate Information Acquisition. I will be giving an introductory speech prior to the open discussion on the subject of number formats and kind code standardization.
I would like to post a summary of my intervention:
The EPO is a major world player in the field of patent data handling. We receive all types of patent data from all over the world (more than 90 countries) and they all come in different formats. We then apply a format conversion process, which includes the transformation of the "raw" data (as provided by the national offices) into "target" data, e.g. the "raw" document identifier into a "target" identifier (country code + number format + kind code). This is done via a business rules engine whose goal is to harmonise and standardize. Without this logic, it would be virtually impossible to build patent families.
Our DOCDB does not only store patent data, it makes it searchable and gives it added value though its patent family building routines. But in order to identify two documents as equivalents, all their priorities must be exactly the same. This means that if we would load unharmonised application/priority numbers into DOCDB, the family building routines would not be able to detect which documents are members of the same patent family.
The EPO's objective is to encourage as much as possible that all national offices use and provide harmonised number formats and kind codes. However, since the reality is still far from that, we have created a working group (the PNWG) whose main function is to analyse and decide on the number formats and kind codes under which the different types of data from the national patent offices worldwide will be stored in the EPO databases. The PNWG produces the official EPO number format tables, which are based on the information obtained from the publishing offices, their industrial property legislation and the WIPO Standards.
The Asian patent documentation represents a particular challenge, as many Asian countries (all besides from Japan, Korea, China, Hong Kong, Taiwan and Singapore) are not yet present in the EPO databases. The EPO is eager to complete its collection of Asian data and is looking forward to cooperate with the national offices in getting a better understanding of the different types of publications they issue and their corresponding number formats and kind codes. This would result in a mutual benefit, as it would enable the EPO examiners to take into account all Asian prior art and thus grant strong European patents, but it would also allow the general public to have access to English equivalents of the increasingly relevant -yet hard to access- Asian patent data.
Tania Malmierca.
Daniel Aran writes on Apr 21, 2009 10:33:41 PM
The recent developements of cross lingual search like Google Translate make it possible to search in Asian documents using non latin fonts. Unfortunately non latin asian patent documents are usually not available for fulltext search.
Advantages of making asian document full texts available could be1) Examiner's search efficiency 2) Many more Asian document citations in search reports.
Daniel Aran,
Examiner at EPO