Data is transforming how IP departments around the world operate. From portfolio management to providing insights to guide mergers and acquisitions, the IP department is proving to be a valuable intelligence resource in corporate decision making.
As a result, in-house executives at major patent-owning companies now have access to a broader range of tools to prosecute patents, manage portfolios, and close deals, such as licensing agreements or patent acquisitions and sales. Meeting the increasing demands for coverage, quality and reliability can be highly challenging for search vendors still relying on substandard patent data.
Although patent data is public domain, curating and maintaining competitive patent search data is time-consuming and resource-heavy. For instance, due to the variances in practices at different global authorities, patent data from various sources need to be further harmonized to deliver reliable insight. Global open-source patent data contains errors ranging from spelling mistakes to inconsistent usage of acronyms. Getting rid of all the incongruencies in the data is a highly time-consuming activity.
Here are a few other challenges that patent search solution providers must navigate to build reliable patent search tools:
Ensuring a reliable and comprehensive database: A search tool is only as good as its data. Patent professionals constantly fear missing out on critical results, so they use several search tools in parallel. Therefore, the more comprehensive the coverage a search solution can offer, the more relevant it becomes for the end-user.
Reducing time-to-market: Accessing various global patent datasets and integrating them into existing solutions can be time consuming and expensive. In addition to the time lost fixing data quality issues, deploying a functional search solution requires that data retrieved from various sources be converted to a standardized format that fits the structure of the search system. Clean, curated and standardized patent data is critical to facilitate faster integration and deliver quality search results.
Maintaining up-to-date data in the database: One essential feature of any patent search solution is the reliability of its search results. This is partly also affected by the frequency of data updates made to the database. Maintaining an up-to-date database will considerably increase patent searchers’ confidence in their search results.
Reliable search results, more importantly, customer confidence in searches, depends entirely on the quality of available data. Here’s what makes LexisNexis® IP DataDirect an excellent data source for any patent search tool:
With coverage of 70 authorities in full-text, including CINPA (the China National IP Administration), including 112+ Million Searchable PDFs, our data has comprehensive coverage and includes all additional files like images of drawings, etc., that are valuable for your customers. Since we collect and harmonize all data types from over 80 data sources, our database includes a large volume of high-resolution PNG images, including thumbnail views.
Patent searchers can easily find specific legal events with the LexisNexis Prime Notified Events data set. This eliminates a considerable amount of time wasted sifting through large amounts of low-quality data to find vital information about the history of a patent. The dataset includes the most significant occurrences in a patent’s history, like payment of maintenance fees, assignments, legal status, etc. This data is retrieved from several raw data sources and is standardized into consistent and uniform legal events.
Also available are forward and backward citation datasets to aid further analytical capabilities built into search solutions. Since the data is already structured to facilitate grouping and clustering based on authority, technology area, date ranges, data elements, kind code, etc., search solution providers can empower users to derive more value from the data by building additional filters. In addition, we provide standardized legal data from national authorities and US litigation data, enabling users to derive much more value.
Most documents published by international patent offices tend to be only in their local language. A significant amount of resources are needed to translate this information into English before data from these offices is integrated into existing search tools. A reliable patent database includes all this information in multiple languages to enable cross-authority checks and to remove the language barrier to understanding the contents of internationally filed patents. Data delivered via IP DataDirect includes the best-in-class machine-translated title, abstract, claims, and description of such patent documents. So, all the patents are not only understandable but can also be searched in multiple languages. If the patent office has officially published a translated version, these are also available in the dataset.
At LexisNexis Intellectual Property Solutions, we are dedicated to supporting the evolution of the IP industry by combining best-in-class content and data with innovative analytics and advanced technology. With standardized datasets for easy integration, IP DataDirect offers a turnkey dataset that can be integrated seamlessly into any existing search solution. In addition, this also ensures faster data processing to avoid lags and disruptions for end-users. Let us work on making sure your data is impeccable and allow you to focus on what is important – building powerful search tools to support the innovation community.
Learn more about how our data can augment your search solution to provide the best search experience to your users.
Learn about the flexibility, wide coverage and technical features offered by our patent Data as a Service, LexisNexis IP DataDirect, that can boost the performance of your IP departments, patent search solutions or data analytics team.
