Breaking news from the Dialog Customer Forum

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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.

A Thomson Reuters representative was also on hand yesterday to speak about enhancements to the DWPI file (which some readers may know as “Derwent”).   In October 2009 Thomson began adding hand translated English language abstracts and claims for the member-level data for CN applications and utility models in the DWPI.    This was a major enhancement to the file, because as everyone knows,  working with machine translated information can be very challenging.   It’s also worth mentioning that  DWPI’s Japanese content is produced by “machine-assisted” translation, in which the translation software “learns” from corrections made by human editors.    And by the way, because DWPI is produced by Thomson Reuters, we know that these efforts are also producing the hand-translated collections of Chinese and machine-assisted translations of Japanese patent collections that were added to Thomson Innovation in 2009 (check out the major recent updates page of our article to learn more).

Continuing the emphasis on Asia, the Thomson Reuters representatives also mentioned that they will be adding or expanding collections for Hong Kong, Thailand, Malaysia, Vietnam, and will be increasing backfile collections for the Philippines and Singapore.  A number of other enhancements to the file were also mentioned, such as the extension of Derwent Assignee code indexing to all companies that hold over 1,000 patents, which should expand the usefulness of this field.

I’m always excited to see developments in the quality of patent information coverage for Asia.  Are there any readers who use the DWPI file regularly who have specific requests for enhanced coverage in this area?

This post was contributed by Intellogist team member Kristin Whitman.