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[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] RE: A standard approach to glueing together reusable X ML fra
 The European Patent Office, the Japan Patent Office, and the World Intellectual Property Organization are working with the USPTO to explore means of reducing redundant efforts -- for example, examine once, assign classifications once, rather than every office doing this over and over when they each get the same application (as they do, tens of thousands of times a year). See http://pcteasy.wipo.int/efiling_standards/EFPage.htm for the mutually agreed markup for patent application structures, one of the first major steps in this direction. The three major offices will all be using this markup for electronic applications and for publications within the next few years (USPTO by 2004 January). It appears now that a thoroughly revised International Patent Classification (IPC) will incorporate many of the distinctive features of the USPC (frequent updates, scope notes, subclass definitions). You can see that this could create further opportunity for reducing redundant work among the industrial property offices without abandoning the value of a classification scheme for patents. Patent applications are sorted on arrival for workload distribution. Clerks, using text searching and their knowledge of the US Patent Classification, assign a classification that will get the application to the right art unit for further processing. Attempts were made to automate this, but automatic classification that improved on what the humans did (~70% success rate, as I recall) was too expensive, I'm told. For this purpose, 70% is good enough. For the final classifications provided by examiners after they have studied the application, it probably isn't possible to achieve good-enough results through automation, or if it is, it would probably again cost too much. I'm not aware of any current projects in this direction among any of the industrial property offices. Claim markup is designed to support claim steps (hierarchy), and there are tags for claim dependency. There are some interesting ideas about how to exploit this. It could help in managing examiners' performance plans and setting fee structures, but no one has suggested how it could be exploited to improve searching. It is, after all, merely logical structure markup, revealing nothing about the technology claimed. But don't loose hope. Just having XML markup is a major improvement over the previous markup that was specific to a piece of 1970's photocomposition hardware used by the printer. Now, at least logical structure and rendering are separated. As the PTO and patent information value-added resellers learn how to exploit the XML, demand for more advanced markup will likely increase. There is a great deal of inertia to overcome not just in the industrial property offices, but throughout the industrial property community, from filers right through consumers of the final information byproducts. Management here fully supports XML on the basis of its potential benefits, but there is little to show for what markup we have introduced so far. When management has some real experience with actual tangible benefits, then I expect things will accelerate. Could take five years or more to get there, in my opinion. One final comment before letting this thread get back on point. The Patent Law Treaty appears to go a long way toward harmonizing policy among patent offices, and, although not yet implemented, seems to be already driving some technical issues here. Bruce B. Cox SA4XMLT USPTO/OCIO/AETS 703-306-2606 -----Original Message----- From: clbullar@i... [mailto:clbullar@i...] Sent: Thursday, August 21, 2003 10:51 AM To: Cox, Bruce; xml-dev@l... Subject: RE: A standard approach to glueing together reusable X ML fragments in prose? You have put your finger on the problem of the semantic web: cost. No one has ever, AFAIK, described it in terms of cost savings. There is likely a case for that, but it would be future savings. We had the same problems in CALS. Even the web was a hard sell initially, but it came with 'a movement' and true believers don't study cost estimates and project savings. They just *go for it*. My intent was to say there are markup opportunities in the patent content even if they are limited in the patent document structures. Also, given the enormous and growing problems of intellectual property in our industry, one would think authorities would be actively exploring technologies to address those problems. To hear that they are going in precisely the opposite direction is disturbing and a potential political problem both nationally and internationally. The problem of course, nationally, is to create technology that correctly and provably implements policy. The problem internationally is to harmonize policies (think Berne convention) that can be implemented in interoperable systems. Classification systems would be a sine qua non of such systems and a very important application of the semantic web. Wouldn't an automated classification and indexing system that reached down to the essential claims speed up the examiner process as well as result in an auditable trail of claims references? It would seem to make the prior art evaluation much simpler and more reliable as well as reduce the costs and probability of patent litigation. Patent searches would certainly be more reliable. It could also enable some exotic means of creating specifications. Who pays? The usual victim: taxpayers. The question is, for what quality of results? len From: Bruce.Cox@U... [mailto:Bruce.Cox@U...] I'm not entirely sure what you mean by "mapping" or "mappable entities" but I can say that examiners, as I understand it, among other things, search for patents that anticipate the claims of the application in hand. If they find none (and this is my take on what they do), then the application in hand is presumed original. Finding prior patents that are relevant is done by text searching and by use of the US Patent Classification (see www.uspto.gov for details). Examiners themselves determine the classifications of a patent at the time it is ready for publishing. Applying any kind of markup to the content of the specification or claim would require someone who would understand the technology well enough to apply the appropriate categories, so this is not too different from applying patent classifications, except that it would require considerably more time and validation (accuracy counts). As far as I can tell, nobody, and I do mean NOBODY, at the USPTO would be willing to pay for that, no matter how valuable it might turn out to be, so again, there is no scaling issue. In fact, there has been considerable effort to reduce the cost of or even eliminate the US Patent Classification, as alarming as that might be. Semantic technologies in general suffer from this defect: they are terribly expensive to implement on any useful scale since they require that someone (a live human with intelligence, knowledge, and experience) apply the markup that makes the web "semantic" (I'm beginning to hate that word). Who pays? 
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