Data is changing the way intellectual property departments around the world function. The IP department is proving to be an actionable intelligence resource in corporate decision making, from portfolio management to offering insights to guide mergers and acquisitions.
As a result, in-house executives at major patent-holding companies now have access to a broader set of patent searching tools. These tools assist in prosecuting patents, managing portfolios, and closing deals like licensing agreements or patent acquisitions and sales. They range from free patent searching tools, such as Google Patent Searching Tool, to paid tools, such as XLSCOUT‘s patent prior art search tool – Novelty Checker. Meeting the increasing requirements for quality, coverage, and reliability can be extremely difficult for search vendors who continue to rely on subpar patent data.
Difficulties in Providing Dependable Patent Searching Tools
Although patent data is freely available, curating and maintaining competitive patent search data takes time and resources. For example, due to differences in practices among global authorities, patent data from various sources must be further harmonized to provide reliable insight. Global open-source patent data contains errors ranging from misspellings to inconsistent acronym usage. Getting rid of all the inconsistencies in the data is a time-consuming task.
Here are a few more obstacles that patent search solution providers must overcome in order to create reliable patent searching tools:
- Creating a trustworthy and comprehensive database: A search engine is only as good as its data. Patent professionals are constantly concerned about missing out on critical results, so they use multiple search tools concurrently. As a result, the more comprehensive a search solution’s coverage, the more relevant it becomes to the end user
- Reducing time-to-market: Accessing and integrating various global patent datasets into existing solutions can be time-consuming and costly. Aside from the time spent fixing data quality issues, deploying a functional search solution necessitates the conversion of data retrieved from various sources to a standardized format that fits the framework of the search system. Clean, curated, and standardized patent data is essential for facilitating faster integration and delivering high-quality search results
- Maintaining up-to-date data in the database: The dependability of search results is an important feature of any patent search solution. This is also influenced by the frequency with which the database is updated. Keeping an up-to-date database will significantly boost patent searchers’ confidence in their search results
Why are data enrichments important in developing a dependable patent searching tool?
Reliable search results, and more importantly, customer trust in searches, are entirely dependent on the quality of available data. What makes XLSCOUT’s Novelty Checker an excellent data source for any patent searching tool is as follows:
1. Provide dependable search results based on high-quality patent data.
XLSCOUT is committed to advancing the IP industry by combining best-in-class data and content with innovative analytics and cutting-edge technology. The AI-based patent searching tool provides a turnkey dataset that can be seamlessly integrated into any existing search solution, with standardized datasets for easy integration. Furthermore, this ensures faster data processing to avoid lags and disruptions for end users.
2. Improve search workflows by using machine translations of patents filed in foreign languages.
Most documents published by international patent offices are only available in their native language. Before data from these offices can be integrated into existing patent searching tools, a significant number of resources are required to translate this information into English. All of this information is available in multiple languages in a reliable patent database, allowing for cross-authority checks and removing the language gap to comprehend the contents of internationally filed patents. As a result, all patents are not only understandable but also searchable in multiple languages.
3. Create new analytical capabilities by using forward and backward citation data.
Forward and backward citation datasets are also available to support additional analytical capabilities built into search solutions. Because the data is already structured to allow for clustering and grouping based on technology area, authority, date ranges, kind code, data elements, and so on, search solution providers can empower users to extract more value from the data by developing additional filters. Furthermore, we provide standardized legal data from national authorities as well as US litigation data, allowing users to derive significantly more value.
How does XLSCOUT’s Novelty Checker help?
XLSCOUT put the use of reinforcement learning to its AI-based Novelty Checker patent searching tool to get quality patent research reports in just 10 minutes. The Novelty Checker uses reinforcement learning to filter the noise from the prior art by pulling up the relevant results on top of the list. To be precise, it assists in conducting patentability search/ patent research to help you ensure that your innovation is unique. By selecting a few relevant and non-relevant results, users can apply them to the result set. The system takes the user’s feedback and then learns from it. Then it re-ranks the results by bringing the quality results to the top and sending the noise to the bottom.
Without reinforcement learning, users go through hundreds of results manually. By applying this process, users can skip going through the non-relevant results. Reinforcement can also be applied multiple times to a result set according to users’ different requirements/criteria. Users can then view the Top-10 or Top-20 results for each criterion to perform a prior-art analysis for idea validation.
Users can quickly generate an automated novelty and patentability search report by selecting these Top-10 or 20 results. The Novelty Checker prior art search reports include a list of results along with relevant text mapping with the key features of the invention for enabling quick decision-making.
