New Indonesian Coverage in DWPI & the Digital Public Library of America Gears Up

Hello Intellogist Blog readers! Today we’ll touch on two interesting news stories: DWPI celebrates its 50th year with new Indonesian coverage, and the Digital Public Library of America is getting ready to launch a new project in April with the addition of National Archives material.

Derwent World Patents Index is a long respected and unique source of value added patent data. Specializing and known for human-generated content such as translated and summarized abstracts, controlled vocabulary, and indexing, DWPI has entered its 50th year of availability.

Coverage within DWPI has grown in recent years to encompass many emerging markets, and Indonesian coverage is the latest example of this expansion. Coverage will include all patent applications and Indonesian Simple Patents published from 2010 forward. The 50th data source in DWPI will be deployed in the following way according to CAS:

Records identified as basics will have DWPI titles and abstracts and manual coding, with deep indexing for chemical records where applicable. The first records, from October 2012, appeared in DWPI update 201309, with the most recently published records being loaded first, followed by the backfile to 2010 over subsequent weeks. The backfile load is expected to be completed in Q2.

How Major Patent Search Systems will Implement the CPC

The full roll out of the Cooperative Patent Classification (CPC) is less than a month away, and the classification search options for US and EP patent publications will soon change drastically for prior art searchers.  After January 1, 2013, the CPC will completely replace ECLA, and all US published applications will carry CPC classifications.  The EPO and USPTO released a “CPC launch package” back in October which contained the complete CPC scheme, any finalized CPC definitions, and an ECLA-to-CPC-to-IPC concordance. The USPTO and EPO have been thoroughly preparing for the transition to the CPC, but how are the distributors of major patent search systems preparing for the implementation of the CPC?  From the Major Recent Updates sections of the Intellogist Reports, I’ve compiled a quick guide on how Espacenet, Orbit.com, TotalPatent, Thomson Innovation, PatBase, and Dialog will make the CPC searchable within each of their systems.

Continue reading to learn how each of these major patent search platforms will handle the new Cooperative Patent Classification!

Database Update Round-Up – European Patent Register and DWPI

Previously, we looked at updates to the Global Brand Database, SciFinder, and Google Patents, and today I have a fresh round of updates about two important resources for any patent professional: the European Patent Register and the Derwent World Patent Index (DWPI). The European Patent Register (formerly known as Register Plus) is the official register of legal status information for the European Patent Office, and it was recently updated in April with a variety of new features, bug fixes, and changes to both the user interface and back-end system.  Derwent World Patents Index® (DWPI) is a file of patent information produced by Thomson Reuters that “sources patent data from 47 patent-issuing authorities and 2 journal sources,” and the file contains many value-added special indexing features, including Derwent Titles and Abstracts, Derwent Assignee Codes, Derwent Families, Derwent Classes, Derwent Manual Codes, and Chemical Fragmentation Codes.  The DWPI file is available on numerous platforms, including Dialog, STN, and Thomson Innovation.  STN recently added numerical search options for the DWPI file, and DWPI has been discontinued on the Delphion platform.

After the jump, learn about the new features and interface changes to the European Patent Register, and we’ll also look at the new numerical search features for DWPI on STN and discontinuation of the file on Delphion.

Where to Find Patent Documents from the Gulf Cooperation Council

I recently learned that the Derwent World Patent Index now covers granted patents from the Gulf Cooperation Council.  According to the GCC Patent Office website, the GCC defines itself as:

A regional office for the Gulf Cooperation Council, which comprises the States of United Arab Emirates, Kingdom of Bahrain, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, Sultanate of Oman, State of Qatar, and State of Kuwait. Certificates of Patents granted by the GCC Patent Office secure legal protection of the inventor’s rights in all Member States.

Bibliographic data on GCC patent documents seems to be relatively difficult to locate; I’ve only found a handful of resources that cover the granted patents or patent applications from the GCC.  I’ll give a brief overview of the GCC, and then we can compile a list of where to find their patent documents!

Vietnam, Thailand, Malaysia Added to Derwent World Patents Index

Recently Derwent World Patents Index (DWPI) added the emerging Southeastern Asian countries of Vietnam, Thailand, and Malaysia to its growing collection. Trailing the BRIC(K) countries (Brazil, Russia, India, China, Korea) that we talked about in our previous post on the new PatBase coverage, these countries in Southeastern Asia are thought to be the next wave of economic development, and thus intellectual property development. Southeast Asia (under the ASEAN banner) accounts for 1.5 trillion USD in Gross Domestic Product. Read on to see what kind of coverage DWPI offers of these three key players in Southeast Asia as well as some interesting patent statistics from Vietnam, Thailand, and Malaysia.

Are your chemical structure searches catching Markush claims?

There are only a few commercial information providers that can cope with the challenge of querying the chemical information disclosed in Markush structure claims in patents.   If you’re not familiar with Markush patent claims,  they are patent claims which describe generic patent structures that could include many different interchangeable parts.  These complex patent claims can disclose hundreds of different potential chemical compounds by describing them in generic ways.  For an example, see the chemical structure searching section of our Best Practices wiki article on Chemistry and Pharmaceuticals Searching.

Some chemical information companies have been interested in creating registries of known chemical substances that exist anywhere (not just in patent art).  For example, the Chemical Abstracts Service has a well-known file of chemical substances called CAS REGISTRY, and the ChemSpider database is a newer service which aggregates publicly available chemical data from the web into a single repository.  But searching Markush claims is not just a matter of querying a database of known structures.  To conduct a successful Markush search, a search engine must be able to search through the patent claim language and understand all the possible compounds that may be covered by structures described in  generic chemical terms.   For example, how would you teach a computer to understand that a patent which claims a compound substituted by “an alkyl, an alkoxy, hydroxy, or amino,” is a good match for the specific chemical structure you drew as a query?

Warning: your electronic patent search databases have gaps!

UPDATE: For a further enlightening discussion of the gaps in the USPTO full text database, please see the comment section of this post (click the word “Comments” where it appears at the very end of this post).

Recently, a message came over Carl Oppedahl’s PAIR discussion list highlighting a mysterious gap in the USPTO’s online patent database: data seemed to be missing for patent numbers between 6,363,527 and 6,412,112.

Rick Neifeld, of Neifeld IP Law, responded that his 1999 survey into the PTO’s data revealed many errors in the USPTO’s data, as many of us have probably suspected for some time.  Rick’s description of these errors is very interesting:

The dirt consisted of things as minor as numerous misspellings of assignee names, or HTML pages non compliant with HTML standards, to HTML text that could not be deconstructed into component sections due to HTML formatting errors, assignment records that were combined, corrupt, unreadable.

I absolutely expect our current crop of electronic patent database to contain massive numbers of errors. We have to expect this, if only because of the sheer amount of information involved.   Another reason might be that the economic model of patent data production does not really encourage the national patent offices to maintain high quality electronic patent data. There are millions and millions of patent documents pouring out of government-run institutions (without a profit motive for perfection), and errors are bound to be rampant.

Green Patents in Derwent World Patents Index

Last week, we touched on green patent classification listings in our post about WIPO’s IPC Green Inventory. This week, we’ll look at a similar green patent classification listing: Derwent World Patents Index’s Green Technology Manual Codes. Come find out how these codes can help you find examples of green technology in your prior art search that keywords just aren’t turning up.

Derwent World Patents Index First View Retired

You may not have noticed it, but Derwent World Patents Index (DWPI) First View went gently into that good night at the end of July 2010. The First View file has integrated into the main DWPI file as the integration dates occured for each outstanding record. Read on to find out what DWPI First View was and why it mattered.

Breaking news from the Dialog Customer Forum

Yesterday I attended the Dialog Customer Forum event, which was held at the USPTO’s Madison building in Alexandria, Virginia. As always happens at these events, there was far more information presented than I can summarize here, but suffice it to say that if you are a Dialog or a ProQuest customer, you will want to keep your eye out for the new product releases that these companies are planning for the near future.