Press release

Minesoft and RWS Group Introduce Corporate Tree To Their Patent Search Platforms

London, 30th October. A new Corporate Tree feature has been added to the global patent search platforms PatBase and PatBase Express to enhance company name searches.

PatBase – developed in partnership by Intellectual Property solutions provider Minesoft and search and translation firm RWS Group – is a professional platform for searching, reviewing and analysing over 100 million patent publications from 101 worldwide patent-issuing authorities. PatBase Express is the end-user version of PatBase, drawing on the same comprehensive patent coverage and offering a streamlined interface designed for casual or endusers. The Corporate Tree has been added to both systems to offer enhanced patent assignee searching for all levels of user.

A patent assignee is the owner of the patent – the person or corporate body to whom all or limited rights under a patent are legally transferred. Company name or assignee searches are a starting point for many patent search projects, and become particularly important when undertaking competitive analysis tasks. Ann Chapman, Director at Minesoft, explains, “We aim to make searching by company as straightforward and effective as possible in PatBase. Variations in spellings, transliteration across languages and patent filing practices in general all contribute to the challenge patent searchers face when trying to gather a conclusive set of results based on company names. When we first launched PatBase in 2003, we made a Browse Index available from the outset to make it easier for users to look up company names in the index and identify variations.”

The new Corporate Tree lookup tool goes a step further, providing a quick and easy way to identify subsidiaries and other affiliations of a chosen company, so that all related companies can be included in a single search. The tool will “help searchers overcome some of the complexities of searching by company name arising from mergers and acquisitions or complicated parent-subsidiary relationships,” adds Chapman. “The newly added Corporate Tree minimises the risk and delivers better results”

Furthermore, Users can take advantage of the new, integrated PatBase Analytics software to extract meaningful insights from their search results and analyse competitor portfolios in even more depth.

Data for the Corporate Tree is derived from a corporate relationship database compiled and maintained in-house by Minesoft & RWS Group.