It can be a big struggle for corporate IP departments to sort and label all of their patent data. Between granted patent holdings, applications in-process, and pre-application invention disclosures, there’s a lot of internal tracking going on. Add to this the process of monitoring technology areas by classification, keeping tabs on key competitor patent filings, and compiling prior art databases for defending or attacking patent lawsuits…well you can see how the data can runneth over. If we limit our focus in this post to discussing patent search systems, we run into a couple of dilemmas immediately: inconsistent data fields ranging over an array of patent documents and the even larger issue of trying to combine data fields from multiple search systems with different formats altogether.
What’s the solution to this cataloging problem? Although there is no one solution, an emerging solution in the patent information field is the addition of custom fields. Custom fields are a way that patent records can be annotated, collaborated on, searched, and tracked–all within a patent search system.
Read on to find out some specific advantages of a custom field system, see how Thomson Innovation has implemented this feature, and what competitors will also offer this feature!
Filed under: Patent Search Systems | Tagged: annotation, custom fields, FreePatentsOnline, SumoBrain, tagging, thomson innovation, Thomson Reuters | 9 Comments »
