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May 5-10 2007 – Patent Information Users Group (PIUG) 2007 Annual Conference, Hilton Orange County, Costa Mesa, California. - Conference Report |
The 19th annual meeting of the Patent Information Users Group (PIUG) was held in Costa Mesa, California, May 5-10, 2007. By the time the conference opened, over 290 attendees had registered, with still more arriving and registering on-site. Attendees included patent attorneys, professional patent searchers – and yes, even a few librarians – who represented independent search firms, corporations, law firms, universities, and commercial vendors from New Zealand, China, India, Korea, the European Union, the U.K., Canada and the U.S. The title of the conference was “Boolean and Beyond: Effective Patent Searching and IP Management”.
The one major topic that came up over and over again throughout the conference was the latest edition of the International Patent Classification – IPC8. There was also a strong emphasis on visualization and analysis tools, and on chemical and biotech patent searching, as many of the workshops and technical sessions directly dealt with these topics. Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA) was another star of the show, with demonstrations of LSA tools from at least three vendors. Another prevailing motif throughout the conference was the concept of using wikis for various applications where global collaboration and communication are necessary.
The annual PIUG business meeting was held on Sunday, May 6. It was the usual type of business meeting that included approval of minutes from the previous meeting, a treasurer’s report, reports from each committee, and a call for new business and announcements. The following are the highlights from the meeting.
Tom Stanton, chair of the Memberships and Dues committee, reported that as of April 2007, PIUG had a total membership of 634 members from over 30 countries. He raised the idea of increasing membership dues and there was much discussion over this. It was felt that a tiered dues schedule might be in order, with seniors, retirees, students and some other groups paying less than regular members. It seemed that most people favored a dues increase. Currently PIUG has plenty of money, but as the years have passed, they have had to hire more and more contractors to help organize various events, and so administrative costs are going up. No decision was made. Instead the issue was handed over to the Strategic Planning Committee who will attempt to tie in the matter with PIUG strategic planning, where they may establish justification for the increase.
Another major item came from Tom Wolff of the Discussion List Committee. The email archives have been migrated several times, and they may be undergoing another migration to another service provider soon. Wolff stated that he was not having any luck communicating with the current provider over some serious technical glitches that were encountered. Wolff also gave a report for the Web Page Committee, announcing that he had put the entire site into a template system that uses PHP. This way navigation, headers and footers and other elements of the site can be consistent on every page.
Stephen Adams of the Patent Office Committee urged members to join this committee, because there was much to be done and that he could not do it alone. Several patent offices are undergoing strategic planning and there needs to be PIUG involvement with each of those efforts. This might even affect PIUG’s own strategic planning. He proposes having one PIUG member to liaison with each of the major patent offices around the world, and suggested setting up a wiki for online collaboration and communication between the liaisons in order to identify themes and trends between the different countries.
The meeting wrapped up with discussion about hiring an executive director for PIUG. It is a large enough organization now, with so many activities and responsibilities that it may be better to hire someone to direct administrative tasks so that PIUG can focus on professional development and patent issues. This topic will also be considered in the process of strategic planning.
In his keynote address, Steinfl discussed some logistical hurdles to prosecuting a patent application in multiple countries. When a patent application is filed in multiple countries at the same time, pendency can vary widely between those countries. It is often important to have access to prosecution documents in each of the countries where the application exists. Having a system for sharing patent prosecution documentation will not only reduce the pendency period, it would also provide for more bullet-proof patent examination and fewer opposition proceedings. Steinfl proposed software technology that could augment these barriers. Some proprietary software could be developed, but using a basic open source wiki with password protection would likely do the job just as well. Using this wiki, patent prosecutors could list prior art, what databases, etc. to make it easier and faster to file patents internationally in multiple countries. The biggest hurdle to implementing such a system would be buy-in from those involved with patent prosecution. Many law firms and patent offices are very careful about what information that they are able to disclose, so they might not want to share their prosecution information with other countries. Additionally, some firms are already using similar systems for storing and sharing information, but those systems are not available to patent searchers at large.
PIUG and vendor-sponsored pre- and post-conference workshops covered International Patent Classification (IPC8); visualization and analysis using Microsoft Excel; STN analysis and visualization tools; the new InpadocDB; using biological sequence data in IP searching; SumoBrain IP search, document delivery, and work-flow management system; MDL ® Patent Chemistry Database; and rapid patent analysis using VantagePoint. The following are summaries of the workshops that I found most helpful.
In this session, Adams presented just about anything anyone would ever want to know about the latest edition of the International Patent Classification (IPC8). He acknowledged the work that was (and is still) involved in creating and managing this radically new classification system – work done by patent issuing offices, contactors, data suppliers and database vendors. He discussed the problems with previous IPCs that led to the need for an entirely new IPC, and weather or not those problems have been resolved since the implementation of IPC8. He also discussed new problems that have arisen with the implementation of IPC8. This new IPC is radically different from previous versions and he pointed out some of the primary differences. He then spent some time showing us how to navigate, search and browse the IPC8 online – which is currently the only authoritative source. He explained the differences between advanced, core and sub-class levels for IPC8 adoption. He informed us of what countries have adopted IPC8 and at what levels they have adopted it. Unlike previous IPCs, IPC8 was designed to allow continual ad-hoc revisions and improvements – alongside the Master Classification Database (MCD) – so he discussed the processes used to manage these never-ending revisions.
At the beginning of his workshop, Dr. Phelps said that each of us would leave knowing at least ten things about Excel that we didn't know previously and that these things could be used immediately to improve productivity and save time on the job. He definitely delivered on this promise. This was perhaps the most useful workshop that I attended. First of all because unlike the large, expensive proprietary search, visualization and analysis tools presented throughout the rest of the conference, Microsoft Excel is something almost everyone has available at their home or office. Secondly, the tips and tricks that Phelps presented can be used to visualize and analyze any type of data, not only patent information.
The various tutorials that Phelps conducted could be broken into four major groups:
There was so much to cover – fortunately Phelps gave each attendee copies of his slides and a CD-ROM that includes all of the example projects used in his workshop, plus additional samples that we didn't have time to cover. This way we can easily refer back to his tutorials later.
This session included an overview of developments in Thomson Scientific products and services over the last year. First, the Thomson Corporation underwent structural reorganization and is now divided into five strategic business units: Scientific, Healthcare, Legal, Financial and Tax & Accounting. The Scientific unit includes the product brands Derwent, Delphion, Dialog, ISI Web of Knowledge, PatentWeb, Web of Science, and Thomson Pharma.
Of these, Derwent, Delphion, PatentWeb and Pharma all received significant enhancements in the last year. Most of the enhancements were value-additions to already existing records, normalized field data, improved indexing and extended coverage of collections; but there were also minor improvements made to the search interfaces and result displays as well. Of these, Pharma appears to have had the most changes, including a complete redesign of the home page with tons of personalization options. Each of these products now conforms to the IPC8.
The reloaded DWPI (Derwent World Patents Index) file has undergone significant changes due to enhanced chemical and polymer indexing. This session explored some of the benefits of these changes that will improve the comprehensiveness of searching for chemical and polymer patent information. DCR numbers have now been added to synonymous registry/ compound numbers in chemical and polymer indexing which means where once one had to perform three separate searches (Derwent registry number, Derwent specific compound number and Derwent chemistry resource number) to get all relevant records, one now only needs to perform one. Other improvements included a revision of EPI and CPI Manual Codes, and all the necessary changes to handle IPC8. There remains some crossover with IPC7 and retrospective indexing has not yet been completed.
Much of this session felt like a repeat of the prior session, except that the examples provided were using the Dialog search platform. As stated above, Derwent underwent major changes over the last year to meet the requirements of the new IPC8 and also to add much more content that provides for new capabilities.
New DWPI content includes all original first level data, documentation abstract backfile, chemical structure backfile, and additional bibliographic details. Also, patent records include value-added descriptive title and abstract along with the original title and abstract. Additionally there are more search and display options that were not possible before these value-additions were made.
I really enjoyed this workshop and learned more about the uses of patent analysis and visualization techniques than in any other session. Brager has a unique presentation style that guides attendees along a logical narrative path (he uses lots of anecdotes of his own professional experiences) only to waylay them with an unforeseen twist. This style led to many "Eureka" moments for audience members. Of course, this was the main point of his presentation, to use visualization tools and rhetoric to get the attention of management staff; and in this situation, we were the management staff!
During his presentation, Brager demonstrated ways that patent analysis can be used for competitive assessment, product development, risk & cost management, licensing and acquisitions – all things that managers have a high interest in, but likely have never considered the uses of patent analysis in this way before. Brager continually emphasized that the most important thing is to "get their attention". Instead of explaining why patent analysis is important to them and putting them to sleep with the details, simply show them a chart of their patent portfolio compared to their top competitor's portfolio. That's one quick way to "get their attention."
Presentation style aside, Brager demonstrated some of the near-unlimited uses of Vantage Point/Thomson Data Analyzer. Like excel, this tool can be used with any types of data, not only patent information. It can also be used in tandem with Excel for extended uses. However, Vantage Point is a sophisticated and expensive tool that will take time, patience and money to master.
Sponsors and exhibitors included Thomson Scientific; CAS (Chemical Abstract Service); IFI Patent Intelligence; BizInt Solutions, Inc.; Minesoft, Ltd.; Elsevier MDL; Patents Online, LLC; FIZ Karlsruhe; Questel-Orbit; GenomeQuest; Technology & Patent Research (TPR) International; LexisNexis; CPA (Computer Patent Annuities); Landon-IP; the Danish Patent and Trademark Office; Patrix, USA; Dolcera; RWS Group; East Linden; Search Technology/VantagePoint; the European Patent Office (EPO); WIPS Global; Korea Institute of Patent Information (KIPI); WisDomain; Patent Café; Patent iNSIGHT Pro; Gridlogics, and SciPat. Each vendor had approx. 10 minutes during the technical sessions throughout the week and during a special 3-hour product review session on Tuesday afternoon to make important product announcements and updates. Vendors who sponsored the conference were given longer sessions.
Beside the product updates, there were also many technical sessions, presentations and panel discussions – too many to list here. To see a full list of the sessions offered, refer to the PIUG website at http://www.piug.org. The following is a summary of the sessions that I found most useful and interesting.
Regular Expressions (or regex) are specialized character strings called metacharacters that are used to find pattern matches in text strings. They are used primarily for validating data in the input fields in electronic forms, but they also have a broader use in text manipulation and data mining applications, such as automatically normalizing inventor or corporate names, or date formats. For this reason they can be very valuable to patent information searchers and data providers.
Phelps did a good job demonstrating how regex could be used to normalize a database of text fields such as assignee name or document number. To him, regex is like a logic puzzle, where the puzzle solver must determine which metacharacter combinations are the most likely to find, locate, and make an action on (such as replacing or validating) all matching text strings. There is a sharp learning curve to understand and utilize regex, but once it is learned it becomes a very valuable tool which will make manipulating large text documents (or collections of documents) much faster and easier.
Most common text editors, word processors and spreadsheet applications have regex engines built in – including MS Word, Excel and Vantage Point. There is no need for special software to do this. The MS products also include tutorials and help sections for learning the ins-and-outs of regex.
The winner of the 2007 Brian Stockdale Memorial Award was (your's truly) Martin Wallace, a 1st year Science & Engineering Librarian and Patent & Trademark librarian at the University of Maine's Patent and Trademark Depository Library. This award is given annually to an individual new to patent information.
The 2007 IFI Patent IntelligenceTM Award went to Harry Allcock, a pioneer in patent information, offering quality products and exceptional customer service throughout his 40 years as leader of IFI.
PIUG Service Awards were issued to three members. First, to Doreen Alberts, in recognition of her service to PIUG as Annual Conference Sponsorship Committee Chair for 2005-2006 and Strategic Planning Committee Chair for 2006-2007.
The second Service Award went to Kartar Arora, in recognition of his service to PIUG as Annual Conference Exhibits Committee Chair from 2004-2006 and Annual Conference Program Committee Co-Chair for 2007.
And the third Service Award went to Ric Snead, in recognition of his service to PIUG creating web pages for the PIUG NE Workshops from 2002-2006 and PIUG Annual Conferences from 2003-2007.
Besides the above, there were breakfasts, luncheons, receptions and other entertainment aplenty. Since I was both an award winner and a first time attendee, I had the honor and privilege of attending every gala event (with the exception of the volunteer dinner reception). I will say this – PIUG treats you right and feeds you well!
In conclusion, I had a very rewarding experience at the PIUG 2007 Annual Conference. I was quite overwhelmed with the amount and variety of the workshops and sessions, most of which I did not summarize here because it would take me weeks to write it all down – not to mention the fact that as a librarian, many of the sessions were just out of my league, or way over my head. I was quite exhausted by the end of the conference.
The 2008 PIUG Annual Conference will be held at the Hyatt Regency Crystal City (Virginia) on May 17-22, 2008. Next year's conference will mark PIUG's 20th year and the 10th anniversary of the first independent, multi-day meeting, also held in Crystal City.
Return to Martin Wallace's Page.
For more information, contact:
Martin Wallace
Science and Engineering Center
Patent and Trademark Depository
Raymond H. Fogler Library
Orono, Maine 04469-5729
Phone: 207-581-1678
Last Updated by: Martin Wallace: 01/25/2008
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