Patent searching - no longer just for the brainy?
Jinfo Blog

By Tim Buckley Owen

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If ever a research activity cried out for semantic technology, it’s the complex field of patent searching. But if you’re still inclined to write it off as a niche activity requiring specialist skills, perhaps now’s the time to think again.

LexisNexis has recently announced enhancements to the semantic search technology that it originally introduced to patent searching some 18 months ago. When a searcher asks for a complex subject, LN’s new “brain” will identify the various possible ideas contained in that request and return related concepts for each of those ideas for the researcher to review, weigh and/or eliminate as appropriate.

The new function will operate on LN’s own TotalPatent and PatentOptimizer products, as well as on intellectual property research across patent and non-patent literature conducted on Lexis. In addition, a new “visualise and compare” tool allows users to analyse any two or three result sets or lists of patents regardless of the underlying search mechanism – for example a Boolean search result and a semantic search result – presumably with the idea of demonstrating just how clever LN’s new “brain” is.

Such developments can surely only help patent searching to move more into the mainstream of research activity (see last October’s LiveWire posting The Chinese are coming for more evidence of this).  Yet, to judge from a recent FUMSI article by intellectual property consultants Martin Goffman and Ron Kaminecki, plenty of info pros still feel they need a pretty elementary helping hand in this field.

Prior Art, Patentability, Validity and Freedom to Operate are among the different searches that Goffman and Kaminecki explain that specialists can undertake – but a little bit of lateral thinking demonstrates that patent activity analysis also lends itself usefully to broader horizon scanning.  At the start of this year Thomson Reuters, which owns the long established Derwent World Patents Index, published its second annual State of Innovation report (registration required); no surprise perhaps that computers and peripherals topped the list, but the significant decline in semiconductor activity might be a little more unexpected.

Whatever the relative activity in particular sectors, there’s good reason to believe that patent activity generally can only increase, not least because of the helping hand it’s expected to be given soon in Europe. The European Commission has just published proposals to make it easier and cheaper to obtain patent protection by registering a patent just once with the European Patent Office instead of across 25 separate member states as at present (or see the handy introduction from OUT-LAW).

So where to go for help, if you want to get into this increasingly mainstream research field?  Info pros in the United Kingdom could do worse than try the respected British Library Business & IP Centre.

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