Asian patent data has become a major part of the worldwide prior art documentation in the last couple of years. It is difficult to search Asian documentation with traditional tools and search strategies, and the IPC as we know it today may not always prove sufficient for effective searches in Asian data.  

The five large patent offices of the world (the offices of the USA, Japan, China and Korea, plus the EPO) have agreed to start working on a common classification system based on the International Patent Classification (IPC). The proposed Common Hybrid Classification will select the best parts of the offices' existing classification schemes for a field-by-field introduction into the IPC, in order to give it the level of detail needed for searching large document collections. (For background information, see the discussion round report at the EPO's Patent Information Conference in Biarritz in 2009: http://www.epo.org/about-us/events/pi-conference/discussion-rounds.html) 

Use the discussion round at "East meets West" this year, to see the Asian aspects of the Common Hybrid Classification project. This is your opportunity to discuss directly with experts from the EPO and Asian patent offices about how they feel that the Common Hybrid Classification scheme will improve the efficient retrieval of Asian patent data.