Date : 8th March 2016
Time : 3 pm – 4 pm IST
Patent documents are frequently published by patent offices in a periodic manner. All the technical and legal details that are presented in these patent documents are known as Patent information. If we take the entire set of patent documents worldwide, it may add up to more than 40 million items.
It is also known that only about one-third of all the technical details revealed in patents are published, the remaining two-thirds are never published. Therefore, this shows that all details revealed as patent information is the most thorough collation of classified technological. Patent information also discloses the country in which the patent is protected and the time at which a patent would expire.
Patent information helps to facilitate in assessing future business ventures. In addition, patent information can be used to assess development trends in fields of science and technology. It can also be used to have a check on all IP actions of competitors. All these findings would be very beneficial for a company’s Research and Development activities.
Moreover, one can find prospective collaboration partners by conducting patent searches and zero in on prospective licensors or licensees. In other words, the partners may use your patents or your company may have a license to use your partner’s patents.
Common Challenges of Patent Searching
- Huge Data to search There is billions of data to be searched to get considerable amount of prior art.
- Filtering a large volume of data Scanning hundreds and thousands of patent documents in limited time period is more challenging. You need to narrow down from a big set of data and get relevant set of results for further analysis.
- Language Barrier Identification of prior arts that are not in English Language OR Patents that may exist in the form of domestically filed patents can be difficult to assess. Patents filed in countries like China, Japan & Korea, in the native languages without any INPADOC / counterpart family members in English language would be hard to analyze. Choosing the right database to conduct the search is also another challenge- each database has its own unique features.
- Inconsistency in Terminology -This is a major challenge as there is no consistency in the words used to describe a certain invention. Patent titles and other content in the patent may be presented as synonyms of common words, or may be presented in a creative way. Hence, to conduct a comprehensive search, we need to consider these variations in terminology which may be present across patents that deal with similar technological domains.
- Assessing patent documents – Once the relevant patent documents have been segregated based on keywords and subclasses, one would still have to look through lengthy descriptions in each patent that is shortlisted. In addition, descriptions may be barely distinguishable between patents of similar objects. It is known that patent search activities are time consuming and requires a different approach.These searches also require a good database to overcome the issues mentioned above. Questel, as a leading provider of Intellectual Property Search & Analytics, we have developed many features in the tool which will help our customers in better managing their patent search needs.
We conduct webinars on a regular basis, where we focus on tips & tricks on short listing relevant data and scanning large amounts of data in a smaller time span. Our webinar covers several aspects regarding the Questel’s Orbit Patent Search and Analytics tool.
We highlight aspects such as number of countries that are covered, some of the user friendly features of the tool, tips on how to conduct searches and the different types of searches. We also present few aspects regarding keyword search, similarity search and search history.
We will also introduce you to the new Mobile version of Orbit.
