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Minesoft and RWS Group introduce sophisticated new Legal Status review tools and a Similarity Search to PatBase, the global patent database. 

The issue of access to current, interpretable legal status data has been high up on the agenda of many patent conferences, user group meetings and online forums since the end of 2013, and enhanced legal status functionality has been developed as a priority for PatBase.

Is this patent active? 

The advanced new functionality speeds up the review of complex patent legal status information, displaying a high level of detail and allowing users to drill down to pin-point specific events e.g. occurring in a specific country or selection of jurisdictions or in a certain month. The augmented Timeline provides a fully interactive graphical display of legal events over the lifetime of a patent application with colour-coding to indicate the event group – is it dead or alive for example? As with the concise legal status Table, the information displayed can be tailored to requirements with filter options, and links are available to view abstracts or to check on current status at the national patent office registers.

Patent ownership 

With company mergers and acquisitions and transfer of patent ownership increasingly common occurrences, the new Reassignment Browser is a significant new addition to the legal status toolset in PatBase. It neatly displays the entire history of ownership of a patent, also referred to as Chain of Title in the USA. The most recent reassignment event only for each patent can be shown, or the table can be expanded to display the whole chain of events.

Legal Status information is an essential component of a patent search, and these latest enhancements are designed to make it easier than ever to ascertain the status of a patent in order to make informed business decisions.

Similarity Search 

Released at the same time as the Legal Status tools, another popular search function – the Similarity Search -has been added PatBase at the request of users, having been introduced to the end-user interface PatBase Express in late 2013. This intelligent semantic-based search option enables similar patents to be rapidly retrieved based on a section of text input from a patent or another scientific document imported into PatBase from other sources.

For further information about PatBase, contact Minesoft on [email protected] or +44(0)208 404 0651

Minesoft and RWS Group today announced important advances in patent Legal Status Searching in PatBase, the global patent family database. 

As patent sales and licensing deals and patent infringement cases increasingly dominate world headlines, the need for accurate, easily accessible and interpretable legal status data is more critical than ever. Recognising this need, Minesoft and RWS Group have introduced impressive new legal status data functionality to PatBase.

Legal Status Timeline

The new Legal Status Timeline gives searchers a fresh way to obtain an overview of the legal events that have occurred during the lifetime of a patent application. A graphical timeline view of legal status events, such as the grant or lapse of a patent, for all members of the patent family is available for each record. The colour-coded timeline makes it easy to see events over time, with a legend provided for quick reference.

Status information is additionally available for EP (European) designated states once the European patent has granted – this represents a distinct advantage to PatBase users since this information is not readily available on other patent search platforms.

Legal Status Groupings

To improve search efficiency, the PatBase data team has now completed a project to create Legal Event Groupings. Similar events (for example Lapsed/Expired/Ceased/Dead) are grouped together and can now be searched simultaneously from the Legal Status search form, saving valuable time.

Completing the new array of legal status enhancements, new Grant commands have been introduced to PatBase allowing users to search across the database for any records containing granted patents from any country with a single database command.

Informing Business Decisions

Ann Chapman, Director at Minesoft, added “Celebrating its 10^th anniversary year from October 2013, PatBase incorporates the European Patent Office (EPO) worldwide legal status file INPADOC, which has formed the basis for legal status patent searching for patent professionals for decades.

In partnership with RWS, we have focussed development efforts on Legal Status functionality in PatBase that will assist users in making informed decisions regarding freedom-to-operate in the marketplace, technology transfer and licensing opportunities and competitive intelligence. Used in conjunction with existing features such as direct national register links and colour-coded legal status tables, these latest enhancements will benefit any searcher looking for concise legal status information for patents.”

For further information on PatBase, please contact Minesoft on [email protected]

Minesoft and RWS announce a new co-operation today with the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) – WIPO’s innovative Cross-Lingual Information Retrieval (CLIR) service has been added to PatBase, enhancing patent retrieval in different languages. 

Powered by WIPO’s CLIR system, two complimentary language search tools – Language Explorer and Term Translator – have been developed for use in PatBase, the international, searchable database of published patent documents.

WIPO developed CLIR – their first multi-lingual tool – for their patent service PATENTSCOPE in June 2010. Designed to help users overcome the language barrier when searching patents published in different languages, the eventual aim was to open up a new way of carrying out cross-lingual searches of global patent databases, such as PatBase, to significantly enhance access globally to patent information. Additional languages have been added to CLIR, extending the initial search capabilities from English, German, French, Spanish and Japanese to include Chinese, Dutch, Italian, Korean, Portuguese, Russian and Swedish. The predominantly scientific and technical nature of patents and the fact that a patent document is often the first publication to appear about new technological or chemical innovation makes for highly specialised, often completely new, vocabulary being used. Often just entering into use, translators and specialist researchers have a hard task as such words are not easily found in dictionaries.

PatBase offers patent information from over 95 countries worldwide in English as well as other source languages, including non-Latin alphabets such as Chinese and Japanese – so cross-lingual search capabilities will hep researchers find more relevant documents. Using the new “Language Explorer“, researchers can discover more appropriate keyword translation both from and into a range of languages. “Term Translator” uncovers relevant synonyms in Chinese, Japanese and Korean languages, helping researchers to better utilise the extensive Asian patent literature.

Minesoft Director, Rahman Hyatt, commented: “An internationally positive response to our beta test of the new cross lingual tools (powered by WIPO) highlights the importance of overcoming language barriers when exploring patent information. A priority for us already, the new CLIR Service will co-exist with PatBase’s multiple language interfaces, viewing of different languages simultaneously on screen, searchable machine translations and on-demand translations. We look forward to further developing our new co-operation with WIPO in future.”