Minesoft: Bridging the digital divide

In today’s global knowledge economy, patent information plays a vital role in technological and economic development. It is, in the words of World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) director general Francis Gurry, a “critical source of knowledge and insight for researchers and innovators, legal professionals, entrepreneurs and policy makers across the globe”.

Ostensibly a form of legal protection, a patent represents a rich and often unique source of not only legal but also business and technical information, with WIPO estimating that up to 70% of technical information found within patent documents is not published anywhere else. If innovation is one of the main drivers of growth, then patent information is a key part of what feeds it. In a digital age, access to electronic patent data is valuable currency.

Exploiting patent information

The volume of patent data published by patent offices worldwide and publicly available increases year on year. According to the WIPO Intellectual Property Indicators Report 2013, intellectual property filing activity is growing at unprecedented levels. The number of patents granted worldwide in 2012 exceeded the one million mark for the first time, representing the strongest rate of growth in nearly two decades.

Online patent databases such as PatBase—created by IP software solutions company Minesoft and search and translation firm RWS Group—enable researchers and innovators to tap into and exploit this vast quantity of valuable information and stimulate innovation in their fields.

Patent information service providers collate global patent data and package it into user-friendly online databases. They have a range of additional features such as keyword highlighting or integrated visualisation tools, and are designed to make it easier for users to retrieve what they are looking for and interpret it.

However, understanding and accessing patent information can be a challenge outside of industrialised nations. The ‘digital divide’—the gap between populations that have access to modern information and communications technology and those that have limited or no access—is an inescapable issue in the field of patent information. It presents a barrier to innovation in developing and less developed countries, whose industrial property offices and academic and research institutions may lack the knowledge, resources and infrastructure to use tools such as PatBase to foster innovation, and support research and development activities.

In September 2012, WIPO launched the Access to Specialized Patent Information (ASPI) programme with the aim of starting to bridge this divide. In cooperation with Minesoft and other commercial providers of patent information, such as Thomson Reuters, the programme aims to support developing countries to more fully exploit their innovative potential. It provides free or heavily discounted access (dependent on the eligibility grouping of the country) to professional patent information resources.

"It is our responsibility to ensure that our tools, like PatBase, are not only made available to them but that the tools themselves are fit for that purpose."

Under the public-private partnership, patent data service providers offer access to specialised collections of patent information such as PatBase, and deliver training and other resources to enable institutions to use patent information to drive regional innovation.

The ASPI programme falls within the framework of WIPO’s Technology and Innovation Support Centers (TISC) project, which focuses on establishing regional centres in developing countries where local stakeholders can increase the level of their technical and scientific knowledge by benefiting from access to specialised resources such as those provided by ASPI.

Encouraging innovation in Ecuador

Minesoft’s participation in ASPI has ushered in new users from all corners of the globe, from Argentina to Vietnam, which benefit from free or nominal-cost access to PatBase. Olivier Huc, business development manager at Minesoft, regularly travels to South America to deliver training seminars on patent searches to TISCs in the region.

“Taking an active role as a Minesoft representative in the ASPI programme allows me to see first-hand how transformative and empowering patent search resources and training can be for developing countries,” Huc says, having returned from Guayaquil in Ecuador, where he delivered a workshop on patent searching as part of a training course for the national TISC network.

Organised by WIPO in conjunction with the Ecuadorian Institute of Intellectual Property (IEPI), the workshop was attended by a mix of IEPI patent examiners and patent searchers from TISCs throughout Ecuador, including universities, chambers of commerce and research centres. As is the formula for training ASPI members throughout the developing world, the course included guidance on searching techniques, the use of patent classifications and how to use WIPO’s PatentScope and the European Patent Office’s Espacenet free public search services.

Huc delivered presentations on the importance of accessing a professional patent database and the methodology involved in searching by using more advanced tools, with live demonstrations on PatBase.

Locally accessible global information

As patent filings continue to increase, along with awareness of the importance of patent information in both developing and developed nations, patent information providers must respond to the diverse and evolving needs in terms of content and accessibility. Searchable machine translations, integrated on-demand machine translation engines and multilingual interfaces are some of the ways providers cater for a global user base.

PatBase, for example, provides non-Latin search functionality, allowing native language searches to be carried out in Chinese or Thai, for example. It also offers cross-lingual information retrieval tools, developed in cooperation with WIPO, which enable searchers to quickly identify keyword synonyms in different languages to enhance their searches.

Huc notes that “at the heart of ASPI and the TISC project is the idea of encouraging relevant stakeholders in these countries to understand and actively promote the benefits of access to patent information to a wider audience”.

He adds: “As providers of patent information, it is our responsibility to ensure that our tools, like PatBase, are not only made available to them but that the tools themselves are fit for that purpose. This means constantly enhancing content (as an example we have just loaded searchable Colombian full text patent data in PatBase for the first time) and incorporating sophisticated tools for interpretation, from linguistic aids such as Language Explorer to analysis and visualisation features such as PatBase Analytics.”

Knowledge feeds innovation. Patent information is a hugely important source of technical and scientific knowledge, but the information can only become knowledge when users all over the world are able to access and understand it. Initiatives like the ASPI programme are important first steps to empowering developing countries to exploit information from patents to increase innovation.

Katy Wood is global marketing manager at  Minesoft and has seven years of experience in the IP industry, specialising in patent information. Her roles at Minesoft have included product development, sales and marketing. She can be contacted at: katy@minesoft.com