PATENT INFORMATION ON INTERNET

In December 1997, the Administrative Council of the European Patent Organisation decided that the European Patent Organisation will offer Patent Information on Internet from about mid 1998 as a way of bolstering the process of innovation in Europe.

The project called DIPS (Distributed Internet Patent Services) is described below

GENERAL CONCEPT

This new service will be specifically targeted at the general public, with particular emphasis being placed on serving the needs of individuals, and / or small to medium size enterprises wishing to find some basic information coming from patent publications. In addition, it will also serve to improve the awareness of publicly available patent information both at a national and the European level. It is not seen as a service designed to meet the needs of patent professionals, which are already served by a number of online services.

In line with the intended target audience, the service will be accessible to anyone having an Internet connection and any mainstream Internet browser.

With this service users will be able to perform keyword, phrase and number searches, through use of a familiar forms based World Wide Web (WWW) interface, requiring little or no end user training. Documents retrieved as a result of such searches will initially be identified by their publication numbers and titles, with further study of the bibliographic data, abstracts, full text and scanned images (where available) of the documents being possible via hyperlinks.

The National Offices of the member states will be the key service providers, giving access to their own national data, to data from any other member state, or to data published worldwide. In principle user access to the proposed system will be via the respective WWW sites of the National Offices, enabling the various pages and forms presented to the user to be customised accordingly (e.g. linguistically). In addition, the Office's own Web site will offer direct access for searching data coming from European (EP) publications and from the European Patent Register. Links will also be provided both to and from these sites from the European Commissions (DGXIII) "IP Cyberlink" site, and from the sites of the Japanese Patent Office and the United States Patent and Trademark Office.

The system will be offered to the public free of charge. The first phases of the system will be implemented by mid 1998. Charging mechanisms for the delivery of documents are under consideration.

FUNCTIONAL DESCRIPTION

The system consists of two discrete levels, these levels being differentiated by both the nature and location of the data that can be accessed. Level 1 is intended to provide primarily a current awareness type service focussed at the national level, whilst Level 2 will provide a more complete "global" service. Though the two levels can be implemented separately, it is intended that a consistent interface will be maintained across the two levels thereby enhancing the ease of use, which is a major consideration when targeting such a service at a broad base of non specialist users.

LEVEL 1

The aim of Level 1 is to provide a system for the dissemination of national patent information particularly focussed on meeting the needs of users wishing to be informed of the latest developments disclosed in patent publications ("current awareness" searching). To meet these needs, the bibliographic data of patents published in the preceding 24 months by all the member states will be made available for search and retrieval, with the corresponding scanned documents also being available to enable deeper study of the documents. The data will be stored in a distributed manner, at the National Offices, with each Office being responsible for providing a common core set of patent information recognisable across national boundaries.

Searches can be performed using basic forms accessed from the Web server of any one of the National Offices or from the European Union Commission server "Cyberlink". By using such a form it will be possible to search for patent information from the country from where the form was accessed, or from any other EPO Member State, irrespective of the actual access point.

A basic minimum set of data of each Office's patent, as shown below, will be available for search and retrieval.

Table I - Minimum Data Set / 24 months

There is also the possibility of extension of this minimum data on an office by office basis. In a first step, extension of the data offered to include National classification symbols and abstract data will be possible. In addition, it is also foreseen that the coverage of the data might be extended beyond the prescribed 24 months.

Documents retrieved as the results of a search query will initially be identified by their publication number and title, with hypertext links being created to enable retrieval on demand of the full bibliographic data for each document. This data will in turn include a hypertext link to download on demand the first of the scanned page images. Subsequent image pages will then be available on a page by page basis.

It will be possible to combine search terms both within and across the data fields listed above, using simple Boolean operators, to allow basic information retrieval.

LEVEL 2

The second level itself consists of two phases, a search and retrieval phase and a document delivery phase. It will be able to support a peak usage level corresponding to about 1.5 million page requests, spread over a 24-hour period. The system will also be accessible 7 days per week.

Phase I

The aim is to provide access to a comprehensive document collection of patents published worldwide. To this end the bibliographic data of documents published around the world with comprehensive coverage back to 1970 and limited coverage back to 1920 will be made accessible for search and retrieval of documents. In particular, for documents published since 1970, each patent family in the database will include a "representative document" having a searchable English language title and abstract.

In addition to this bibliographic data (available for approximately 26 million documents), the first page image and drawing pages (where they exist) and the full text of each "representative document " (in English, French or German) in character coded form will be available for display.

The data for this level will be stored in a central database in contrast to the distributed storage of Level 1. Searches will be performed using basic forms accessed from any one of the National Office Web servers (as for Level 1), with the contents being submitted to the central database. These forms will be designed to look like (or be identical to) those of Level 1, ensuring a consistent seamless interface for searching data at both levels.

The data, as shown below, will be available for search and retrieval.

Table II

As for Level 1, documents retrieved as the results of a query will initially be identified by their publication number and title, with hypertext links being created to enable retrieval on demand of the full bibliographic data for each document.

According to the publication date of the document, it will be possible to retrieve:

• For documents published since 1970, the data of the "representative document" will be displayed: bibliographic data, abstract in English. These data will contain hypertext links allowing to display/ download on demand the First Page Image of the document, the full text or claims in character coded mode (HTML) and the first page of the document in scanned image form.

• For documents published before 1970, abstracts and full text will not be available in general, but the complete documents in facsimile mode will be.

• For documents published before 1920, only the bibliographic data will be available.

The "look-and-feel" of Level 1 will be maintained in Level 2, with all pages being customised according to the National Office via which the data is being accessed. For the user it will be transparent whether the search is being performed in distributed data at the Office of entry, at another Office (Level 1) or in a central database (Level 2).

Phase II

In this second phase, a system for on demand delivery of scanned full-page images will be made available. On line delivery will be on a document by document basis, with the pages making up the document also being delivered one by one. Access will be possible for documents retrieved during a Level 1 or Level 2 query as described above. Batch delivery will also be possible through the National Offices.

Access to the documents will as far as possible be online, such that transmission of data to the user effectively begins as soon as the request is received. For some documents, it might be acceptable that there is a short delay between the receipt of the document request and the beginning of data transmission back to the user. It should be noted that in Phase I the user will be able to access in real time the full text in character coded mode and the drawings of the documents published since 1970.

Where possible, documents will be delivered from a "local" data collection, with a central collection providing those that are not available in this way. A table of correspondence based on the family inventory will make possible the choice of documents in any given language where these are available.

For further information, please contact Gérard Giroud

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