PatentConsolidator

Development of a software tool for the automated creation of patent portfolios

Shortfacts

Motivation

The number of patent applications is rising continuously. In 2011, it exceeded the two million mark for the first time and in 2012, there were 2.35 million patent applications worldwide. However, when searching for patents, statistically analyzing patents or evaluating patent portfolios, the question arises: who applied for the relevant property right and who owns it?

However, answering this question is not always easy. According to a KPMG study, 387,000 mergers and changes of ownership of companies took place worldwide in 2013, with an upward trend of 17%. But other causes also lead to heterogeneous designations in registration information, all of which relate to the same registrant: From different names for the same company - due to filing by a legal representative (patent attorneys) - to orthographic errors, translation or transliteration problems and country-specific peculiarities of the respective patent offices (e.g. only naming the inventing person during the filing phase in the USA). On the other hand, there are cases in which different persons actually have the same name or the same parts of a name or in which names are very similar and have to be differentiated. In practice, time-consuming manual searches and comparisons are therefore usually necessary in order to keep the application and ownership information of the patents uniform and up-to-date.

Innovation

The aim of the cooperation project is to develop a modular, largely self-sufficient and therefore universally applicable software tool to automate these work steps. By combining different methods of semantic information processing, an automated consolidation of patents and the homogenization of proper names, such as company or personal names, is to be achieved. In addition to the application information (e.g. name, address, legal representation, inventor), other information (e.g. IPC classes for categorizing inventions, assignment of persons to companies, relationships between companies) is also to be taken into account, including information from the content of the patent (e.g. typical technologies, industries). To this end, the project is developing a new type of interactive software tool that allows users to combine, configure and execute intelligent methods based on machine learning. The software tool is to be integrated into the existing system environment of InTraCoM GmbH in the future, but will also be marketed as an independent new product or integrated into third-party systems.