Patent Librarian's Notebook

The European Patent Office announced that in the first half of 2005 the number of unique users accessing esp@cenet per week reached 65,000; more than 11 million PDF page downloads per week was also recorded during the same time period.

Recent improvements to espacenet include the addition of a new classification tag for nanotechnology, Y01N, and changing the Number Search to allow users to enter numbers without using a country code. For example, entering the number “6000000” will retrieve US6000000 and AU6000000.

esp@cenet

A team of researchers at the University of Michigan’s School of Information are working with IBM scientists to develop new tools for searching and analyzing patent data. The NSF-funded project will use natural language search technology developed at the IBM Almaden Research Center, where the Free Patent Server was launched in 1997. IBM renamed the service the Intellectual Property Network (IPN) and then Delphion IPN, before selling it to Thomson.

While the press release describes the project as benefitting “individuals and businesses of all sizes,” the project description emphasizes the development of new tools to help businesses identify “patent thickets… dense webs of overlapping patent rights that an organization must hack its way through in order to commercialize new technology.” Certainly, this will be of most interest to companies in patent-intensive industries such as biotech, pharma/chemical and IT. It’s unclear what impact it will have on independent inventors and small and medium-sized entreprises.

UMich SI Press Release
Project Description

Full document downloading and printing is now available in espacenet. However, users must first type in a 5-8 digit alphanumeric code in order to begin the download. These alphanumeric codes are intended to thwart spiders and other software that download documents in bulk.

http://ep.espacenet.com/

Mike White
Kingston, Ontario

The USPTO has published an executive summary of a new project that aims to create approximately 1,300 “search templates” for each of the ~600 classified areas of science and technology found in the Manual of Classification.

According to the notice published in the 22 November Official Gazette, search templates will define the search field and resource areas of general subject matter, classes/subclasses, patent documents (both US and foreign) and non-patent literature that an examiner should consider each time a patent application is examined in the given classification.

Executive Summary – Search Template Project http://www.uspto.gov/web/offices/com/sol/og/2005/week47/patexsu.htm

Search Template Project
http://www.uspto.gov/web/patents/searchtemplates/

Mike White
Kingston, Ontario