Engineering information as prior art
Subject indexing has usually been added to these databases since such areas can be complex, and it is best to take advantage of this additional level of detail to find materials that cannot be found just by looking for words in a title or abstract.
Note that whenever someone is conducting leadingedge research and they develop a new concept or invention, they are free to name it whatever they wish, but consider what the indexing sources have to do whenever they are faced with identifying a new idea: they index it under their already established terminology.
Patent offices around the world are faced with indexing new inventions every day and they rely on different systems of classification codes. Therefore, a complete search will involve codes of some type as the very nature of research involves reporting on concepts that have not been identified up to the point of publication.
We conducted a keyword search on the concept of using microwaves in situ to extract oil from tar sands by fracturing the rocks in the ground and then heating them with radiation.
The search of patents on destructive distillation using subject terms indicates which International Patent Classification (IPC) code was used most often to identify similar patents to this technology, though even this code should be supplemented with additional search terms, as it too, is an approximation.
Still, using this IPC code of C10B 53/00 would find any new ideas of extracting oil from similar technologies, even though the keywords ‘Destructive Distillation’ were not used by the inventor, and strictly speaking, the distillation is not necessarily destructive.
This code is the best approximation to this technology and it not only can be used as a broad brush to find prior art, the lack of a distinctive code also indicates that this technology is too new to be coded. The code is a bit broader than the technology and thus it will find the use of the concept without being tied to specific terms.
Consider also that this would also pick up other, though similar, methods of extracting organics from in-place strata. Thus, the best search would involve both keywords to identify the leading-edge technology, and also the necessary classification codes to broaden the search out in the hopes of finding similar items that are not easily identified by keywords alone.
The Inspec database recently added IPCs to its indexing, making it easier to search this source of non-patent literature at the same time as most patent databases, as all of these files use the same codes.
Because there are two systems of classes within this database, you can use one to find the other. For example, a record found in Inspec indicates an Inspec code (B8549C) for ‘Process Heating’—a general term for methods of raising the temperature in a sample (here, oil-bearing strata). This record also contains an IPC (F24C- 0007/) for ‘Microwave Heating.’
Thus, a keyword search would lead you to this record and then you are given codes from two different systems that could be used for further processing. And, as long as the record is on-target, this result could be used to yield results that would normally not be found, save for the linkage between not only two different databases, but two different classification systems—all associated by one structure.
Ron Kaminecki is director of the intellectual property segment at Dialog LLC. He can be contacted at: ron.kaminecki@dialog.com
