A one-stop shop

“Ten years since its launch, PatBase is celebrating continued growth in all major world markets for patent searching and documentation, while during this time, both producer companies have won the Queen’s Award in the UK for sharp, sustained growth in sales overseas,” says Ann Chapman, co-founder of Minesoft, headquartered in London.

Owned by Minesoft Ltd and RWS Group (which acquired foreign filing company inovia In October), PatBase contains full texts from 23 patent offices, grouping equivalent patents filed in different countries into “families”, of which there are (currently) 48 million.

Where it all began

RWS Information’s patent searchers were unable to find a single database that met their needs, so it developed an in-house system with a focus on classification searching. Recognising the potential for a commercial system in 2003, RWS joined forces with Minesoft to design and produce PatBase for RWS searchers and professional patent searchers worldwide.

"Available in seven languages (chinese and portuguese added most recently), patbase express is ideal for people who search less often or need only a quick look" Ann Chapman

It was designed from the start as a searchable, web-based patent resource for professional patent searchers—designed by patent searching and programming experts for expert searchers. Beta-testers in leading European and US companies tested the developing database extensively before it launched 10 years ago.

How it works

The backbone of PatBase is based on a set of patent data, known as the DOCDB file, supplied by the European Patent Office (EPO) to commercial subscribers.

Issued weekly, it replicates all the data provided on the EPO’s free database, espacenet, which covers many patent offices. However, there are gaps and other coveted data collections, so to meet these needs, PatBase adds or supplements data from a whole range of national patent offices, in addition to working closely with the EPO—also through PatCom, the association of commercial patent database vendors—where Chapman is currently a member of the executive steering committee.

In the case of larger countries where the EPO has incomplete collections, PatBase purchases data directly from national patent offices, as well as data from independent sources (private companies). In this way, PatBase is able to offer its customers a comprehensive patent search resource and the database itself is one of the largest in the world today, which presents many opportunities for expert searchers, as well as the constant challenge of retaining high search speeds on complex data—keeping the IT teams of Minesoft and RWS on their toes.

"Over 35tb of data and 40 million full-text patent documents sit behind patbase, growing by daily data feeds from around the world."

PatBase compiles records from a wide range of jurisdictions, but the countries of focus are driven by client demand. Listening to its clients, RWS and Minesoft develop the database based on what they need, first concentrating on all the major patent filing countries (US, UK, EPO, WO, Germany, France, Korea, China and Japan).

Smaller jurisdictions such as Thailand became much requested, for instance, particularly in the pharmaceutical field, so PatBase painstakingly added the Thai patent and utility model collections.

PatBase was the first Western searchable patent system to develop non-Latin language search engines (eg, for Thai or Chinese) and the technology development associated with PatBase remains innovative, currently having added a new Legal Status search module that is generating positive feedback from patent attorneys just weeks after being made available.

At the end of October the new PatBase Analytics module is being launched. That will make it possible to quickly analyse 100,000 patent documents, requiring a huge increase in power and speed made possible by an investment that quadrupled the power behind the system in the last 12 months.

Who are PatBase’s clients?

“They range from corporate IP departments and patent attorneys (in industry and private practice) to corporate research and development (R&D), patent information and licensing specialists,” says Reinhard Ottway, chief executive of RWS Group.

For R&D, which extends to a large community of end users alerted to the value of patent information by their expert in-house search teams, as well as for patent attorneys and paralegals with varying search needs, PatBase developed a simplified interface to the same underlying data: PatBase Express.

Available in seven languages (Chinese and Portuguese added most recently), PatBase Express is ideal for people who search less often or need only a quick look. As Chapman notes, expert patent searching is a profession in its own right and PatBase is one of the leading search tools used by European and US patent searchers who are developing an international, recognised Certification of Patent Searching.

As both companies are headquartered in the UK and offer other related products, Europe initially provided the majority of PatBase’s users. However, growth in other world markets means that today, the US and Japan account for significant revenues approaching 50 percent of the total. Usage in other IP hotspots such as Israel, India and Asia generally is also on the upwards curve.

Looking east

RWS Group and Minesoft exhibited at a patent conference in China in September, where their brand new Chinese language interface for the full, advanced version of PatBase was launched. Chapman says: “We bit the bullet and developed the entire product in Mandarin Chinese—help files, user manual, training materials as well as every bit of the interface. Luckily, many of our staff are linguists so we enjoy these aspects of our work!

“This is a big ongoing commitment for us, as each time we enhance our service—that means continually, as our existing customers can bear testament—we will mirror the changes in the Chinese version, as in our Japanese version.” Although still early days, PatBase is now being subscribed to by native Chinese companies as well as by users based in China who use PatBase as part of a global subscription organised elsewhere.

Ottway was in China this September with Minesoft director Jochen Lennhof, meeting with the Chinese Patent Office and major companies for the launch of the new service. He says: “We are seeing already the big international players in China signing up to our product and I am sure this will filter down to the smaller companies over the next couple of years.

“China is set to become a key part of our growth, with patent experts realising the need to pay for the extra edge PatBase can offer. This has been quite a significant change, for us, over the past two years, hence our new Chinese language PatBase service.”

The enduring popularity of PatBase is due to various factors, such as the interface, which is carefully designed to cater for complex searches to be performed in a logical, streamlined, fast and time-saving manner. The time-saving element can be traced back to the initial important decision to organise the data into families, as this enables the most efficient searching and display of results, while published patent data grows exponentially in today’s world.

“PatBase is easy to use, contains comprehensive data and offers a raft of assisted tools providing, for example, priority maps for patent family analysis or analysis for competitive intelligence reporting,” says Chapman. Information related to a single invention is accessed from one single point: a search gives a concise record, while full-text viewing and on screen examination offers advanced highlighting viewing map options, side-by-side or double screen viewing, as well as a whole host of links to national registers, PDF copies, legal status, images and other aspects related to the invention. PatBase allows for fast sifting of patent information, a strong point in today’s global village.

Indeed, the global nature of patent data influences another PatBase ‘plus’ factor: the extensive machine translation service, a big topic currently in the patent industry.

Minesoft and RWS decided from the beginning to use machine translation—RWS is a renowned translation company so it made sense to utilise areas of expertise in the product—and PatBase offers full-text machine translations into English, indexed and stored, and therefore searchable (either with original English language texts or as searchable machine translations only). Machine translations are re-run behind the scenes on a rolling basis, to take advantage of improvements in the understanding of linguistics.

The aim is to provide some English full-text for every PatBase family. The company translates all non-Latin full-texts and provide a side-by-side display of the original language with an English machine translation (both searchable).

For Latin languages it provides one representative English full-text machine translation where there is no official English text available (when an official translation/original English language text becomes available for a family, the machine translation is replaced). English language can be translated into other languages too, on the fly, to make it easier for non-native English speakers to read patents.

China is an increasingly important target market, so the new Chinese PatBase interface was accompanied by the release of more than 20 million US, EP and WO patent documents, machine translated into Chinese in PatBase, a boon to Chinese Mandarin language researchers.

Quality control

Along with machine translation, quality checks are another key feature of the database, with PatBase using a combination of manual and computerised checks for things such as unreliable data or incorrect translations.

Patent Offices publish thousands of documents and naturally, errors do creep into data. This affects all countries, and some provide more of a challenge. For example, PatBase’s data team has run extra checks on Indian, Thai and Italian data to offer a cleaner feed.

“In Thailand, PatBase was helped by associates to clean up the data. Thai machine translations didn’t do the trick, and we had some specific problems with the data collection—for instance, it did not include priority information—so this was manually added for approximately 100,000 publications” explained Sophie Helliwell, PatBase data operations manager.

Ottway says the quality of data from places such as India is expected to improve. IT infrastructure and data management processes in the patent offices are being implemented, and often new members of staff make a real difference in improving the overall reliability of data. PatCom has helped improve the communication about the data feed to patent database vendors in some jurisdictions, too.

The human element is a factor. The right people and processes can change the way everything runs—almost always for the better.

Against this backdrop, upholding the highest standards remains paramount for PatBase, because while adding sophisticated tools is a given, behind that sits the data.

Trends

Since PatBase launched 10 years ago, the way data is collected has changed. Then, things were just becoming electronic and, while data packages were available, they were far fewer, so it meant a lot more work. Now, many patent offices have developed new and better IT systems, so they provide better formatted and, to some extent, standardised data. “Not always though—so for instance the initiative from the World Intellectual Property Organization is helping less-developed countries publish their data. The EPO’s work has been very significant in this regard as well, which is a great help to the entire patent search community,” adds Chapman.

“The outcomes of searching patents are so important for corporate and legal firms that in some ways patent searching has remained constant. However, by their nature, patent searchers are scientists and engineers, open to new ideas and while there may have been a generational IT gap, it has narrowed. Yes, we do notice there are patent professionals more eager to embrace new technologies—this is the way of the world—so we find ourselves going into companies with a diverse audience and seeing how people adopt new technologies,” says Rahman Hyatt, business development director for Minesoft.

“Luckily PatBase can be used in a traditional way (command line searching) or a user can take full advantage of all the new type of web-based search tools we develop, while the underlying data is the same. This is why our PatBase User base has been able to grow so fast. All the time, we see PatBase Users adopting new ways of manipulating data and we get highly positive feedback in general,” he continues.

PatBase faces big challenges ahead, for sure, one of which is to continue fast growth in the established patent markets by convincing more users of other services to try out PatBase.

It sits well alongside other specialist services and is quoted often as an excellent viewing platform overall for patents. “Change can be (is!) daunting,” Chapman says, “but PatBase is on call to new users, with online tutorials and training on demand as well as dedicated helpdesks—whatever we can do to get our newcomers aboard and to feel comfortable with our product.”

The signs for PatBase are encouraging. Going into a market against far larger established players such as Thomson Reuters and Reed Elsevier was never going to be an easy task, but in this 10th anniversary year its ambitious producers have plans to roll out new PatBase capabilities and a new product to further define and globalise their deepening presence in the world IP searching marketplace.

Ann Chapman is Co-Founder of Minesoft Ltd, info@minesoft.com, +44 (0)20 8404 0651;

Reinhard Ottway is CEO of RWS Group, patbase@rws.com +44 (0)20 7554 5400