IP DataDirect-Patents: single source and comprehensive patent data flow

For patent owners and inventors, it’s a perennial problem. It’s all very well making new products, developing inventions and preparing them for market, but none of that will be of any use if you don’t have detailed information on the patent landscapes in your various marketplaces. Similarly, once patents have been granted, it’s crucial that proprietors have effective methods of monitoring new filings in the industry, as spotting potential problems as early as possible is a key to commercial success.

Businesses have traditionally tackled the problem in a few different ways. There’s what might be termed the conventional approach— tasking juniors with trawling public records of patent filings from all the relevant jurisdictions, approaching patent offices where necessary and exposing the company to the combined risks of human error and time-wasting.

More recently, companies and service providers (and even patent offices) have developed more sophisticated methods to ensure their patent searches are accurate. Patent office online archives have helped, cutting search times and ensuring a more comprehensive overview of existing rights. Various software programmes have improved matters too, enabling comprehensive and realtime search and analysis of patent data from several different sources.

But with IP DataDirect-Patents, LexisNexis® has taken things a step further. It provides the most comprehensive global patent information from 102 patent authorities, including full-text access to the data from 32 authorities in one single data format in one go—as a data delivery process to be loaded into the client’s patent search—monitoring and analytical systems, and library databases.

The data includes all available details, such as legal status, patent families, images, forward citations, PDFs and the full descriptions and claims in the language of publication, as well as machine translated from French, Spanish, Italian, German, Dutch, Swedish, Russian, Japanese and Chinese.

There are several key differences between IP DataDirect-Patents data feed and those available from patent offices or other suppliers in the market.

For example, IP DataDirect-Patents data is merged from various available sources, meaning you can be sure it is as clean, up to date and comprehensive as possible, and that it is all in the same data format. In addition to what is being published by the issuing authorities, IP DataDirect-Patents also creates searchable full text by extracting data from the original publication document by OCR technology.

This means the data is not only enriched and standardised, but also more complete than what is provided by the patent offices when it comes to searchable descriptions and claims. IP DataDirect-Patents automatically applies regular updates to the data. Clients will not only receive newly published documents, but also older documents that have been updated on classifications, legal status, forward citations and new family members.

IP DataDirect-Patents gives customers a time advantage too: all the different data elements are loaded into LexisNexis® systems as soon as they are published by the issuing authority, and updates are available for clients within 24 hours of LexisNexis® receiving the data.

One of the key assets of IP DataDirect-Patents is its flexibility. Depending on the customer’s particular requirements, API requests can be for specific data elements, such as a single machine translation, or for image or XML batches containing numerous elements. LexisNexis® can help customers decide on the appropriate balance between data volume and the speed of retrieving it.

Customers will need to review their requirements and capabilities before deciding exactly how to use IP DataDirect-Patents. Requirements can be as detailed as specific technology sectors, authorities, data elements, full-text, PDFs, images, timeliness and date ranges. LexisNexis® offers consulting support to any customers who are unsure of the best way to proceed.

Who benefits?

IP DataDirect-Patents can be useful for a range of clients. Most obviously, it’s suited for IP management solutions for corporate endusers, including company intellectual property departments, as well as government entities and educational organisations. Because of the various tailoring options for access to specific patent data, IP DataDirect-Patents is an efficient way for companies to keep on top of developments in patents in their industry without the concern of handling large non-standardised volumes of patent data.

But corporate end-users are not the only ones who can benefit from IP DataDirect-Patents. Vendors, including suppliers of patent search solutions, and patent analytics or patent landscaping solutions, can easily tailor their services to specific areas of need. Many patent search database providers that already use IP DataDirect-Patents benefit from the ease of using a single import format and workflow and the uniform delivery mechanism that saves ongoing development costs.

Finally, IP-focused application developers can use IP DataDirect-Patents to develop custom or ‘off-the-shelf’ applications for the IP industry that require patent data. And because it offers multiple application programming interfaces, application developers are able to choose their interface based on their specific requirements and capabilities.

What’s the use?

Each customer has their own data and data retrieval needs, which are highly dependent on the end user solution the data is being used for. Though for many, a simple data retrieval and delivery process will work best.

This entails logging on to IP DataDirect- Patents client software and request all patent documents that has changed since the last visit, including updates to existing publications and any new publications. It is also possible to only obtain information on entirely new publications. After the request, the data will be automatically prepared and delivered to the customer for usage in any solution that requires large volume of patent data.

There are additional complex retrieval processes, in which the user can request information on batches or single documents before they are downloaded. And if dealing with large volumes of information, requests can be queued and retrieved once completed. All functionality to integrate IP DataDirect-Patents into the data process workflow of the customer.

And corporate end-users, who maintain specific publications sets limited to particular authorities, date ranges or classifications are able to download commands to retrieve subsets of publications according to their particular needs.

For those companies that don’t have an efficient way of retrieving patent data, IP DataDirect- Patents platform may very well provide the solution they’ve been looking for.

After all, retrieving data from different sources and preparing those different data feeds for usage in a solution is challenging, time-consuming and expensive. IP DataDirect-Patents is far more efficient in time & money, is unparalleled in terms of content coverage, and will significantly reduce the time to market.

For more details on IP DataDirect-Patents, visit: http://internationalsales.lexisnexis.com/oursolutions/ corporate/research/ip-datadirect.aspx

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