The
P9 Search System is now installed on-site with four professional patent
search firms and a two Fortune
500
companies. This gives them affordable, secure,
powerful,
high-speed search capabilities their competitors can only dream about.
P9 Search System features
- Full text
searching - proximity and Boolean,
- Updated US
classes, 6 times annually,
- Complete US Image
inventory in your office
- High-speed
printing to all PCL5e/6 HP printers,
- Online index and
text
updates (handled remotely - Automated - You do nothing!),
- Flip
full facsimile image pages at an average speed of 650 milliseconds/pg,
- Full text of all
US patents from 1976 to the current issue week -1),
- Full text of all
published US Applications (March 2001 to current week - 1),
- The number of
users is only limited
by the hardware (up to 100 users per server)
- Custom, high
quality hardware is included
- Supports ALL
browsers on your network (Mac, Windows, and Linux systems, too)
Face
it, the number of accurate, timely
searches is the key to a
profitable search business. And, having access to full text
searching
and image viewing ON Y OUR LOCAL AREA NETWORK means profit. Whether you
use it for professional searching, or for research, time is money. Our
P9 system is nothing short of a necessity for most
large, profitable,
high-tech businesses, today.
Your users can
complete novelty, validity, and infringement searches, and perform
patent research in record
time. Certainly much faster than using a typical "online" system.
Our design and the improvements are a result of the requests by dozens
of professional patent searchers.
Like many typical software design companies, we don't design something
and then just force you to use it. The P9 system is truly a cooperative
effort between the professional users and IP Data Corporation.
The latest user interface was updated and improved based on
the recommendations and requests from a base of over 75 professional patent searchers
(many who are were patent
examiners), and many of the
features added
or upgraded were based solely on user feedback (Note: We
appreciate your input, immensely - Thank you!).
With P9 Version 6, we introduced much faster text searching, much
smaller
indexes (1/3 the disk space requirements for indexes over P9V4 and V5)
and many additional features. The
indexing technology is our own, designed and implemented by our
engineers in-house, and is not licensed
from "someone else."
This is why we can afford to put an entire
search system in your office with every US patent and application,
fully
searchable and ready to use for under
$80K $12,000.00 and only $10K/year for all
text, images and index updates
(which includes six US class updates annually). This
includes the ALL patent data, text
and images, and - yes, you own it!
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Initial P9
Design Goals Summary
The initial P9 system
was
designed specifically
for a professional patent search firm by IP Data Corporation. The name
P9 was chosen because it was the 9th iteration of the system design.
As stated in their 2003 Annual Report, the EPO
stated:
========QUOTE========
Finally,
applicants
now
have sophisticated search tools at their
disposal
in a wide range of on-line systems which they use with great skill.
They
thus have the ability and the technical wherewithal to make an accurate
assessment of the state of the art before filing their applications.
The
credibility of the patent offices would be directly called into
question
if their attachment to traditional methods rendered them unable to
obtain
results as good as, if not better than, those achieved by the
applicants
themselves.
Characteristics of patent literature. Patent documents include
large
numbers of figures, diagrams or drawings which are essential to the
understanding
of their content. The associated text is frequently written in a
highly
esoteric technical language which makes it difficult to read. Both
these
aspects have to be taken into account when designing an automated
search
system. A search system based solely
on
full-text
searching will be of very limited use. Text
has to be
supplemented by
graphics.
The user must be able to switch between text and images easily and
intuitively.
Navigating within the document, moving from one figure to the text
passage
describing it, and vice versa, jumping to another part of the text
referring
to the same figure, displaying the next figure, etc. are mandatory
features
of any electronic search tool.
========UNQUOTE
========
We
agree with this assessment. This is why
you can no longer
have just the full text to read as you search to narrow down your list
of candidate patents. You must also have the images of the
patents
as they are legally issued right in front of you with the text
as
you read patents from your search results. This is what the
examiners use, and what is available at the USPTO,
and
this was the first major goal of P9. The searchers wanted to be able to
have the text of the patent on the screen,
and
be able to flip through the pages of the legal documents (which is what
patents are) while independently
scrolling the text. P9 provides this - and it had to be fast -
after
all, to professional searchers, time is literally money.
Most of the
searchers in
the firm were
examiners at the USPTO for a number of years, and therefore had
used
the EAST and WEST search systems at the USPTO extensively (both
the
public
system, and private examiner's system, as well).
The first
phase of our
design was to go to the USPTO and closely watch and document several
professional patent searches from start to finish on the WEST system.
From
this we could see exactly what features they used the most, and why. We
also looked closely at the WEST interface itself to see what interface
features we wanted to implement (and could implement). Quite often, the
learning
curve
is a big part of the cost of any new system, and the less they had to
learn
the better. For this reason, partially mimicking the WEST interface
made sense,
to
an extent. After this visit, we sat down and built a list of "must
haves"
for the initial system, and finally we went into some detail on the
user
interface. Here is a short list of the most important Must
Haves that were decided on. The list is divided into 5 basic
sections:
Indexing/search
data:
1)
The
system
would
have the full text of all US patents from 1976 to the current
issue
week, and the full text of all published applications from 2001 to the
current publication week (indexed and searchable in the system).
2) The
system would
have all patent and application high resolution image pages back to
1790
(literally all of them). The images with no matching text files would
be
indexed and searchable by document number and current U.S.
classification
and assigned current cross references classes. Those of you that
have
ever
"searched the stacks" understand what this is about.
3) The
text would
be divided into the following searchable/selectable indexes: Title,
Abstract,
Inventor, Assignee, Examiner, Legal Rep (Agent/Attorney/Firm),
Government
interest text, Parent case text, Foreign references, other publication
references, Claims, and Detailed descriptive text sections.
4) P9
would be able
to execute Boolean full text searches on any
single index, or all of the text indexes simultaneously. You would also
be able to build on previous search results in a multi-level fashion
(e.g.,
Results of Search 1 logically ANDed with results of search2 (out to
1000
levels). Proximity operators would be available to search simple
phrases and words Adjacent or Near each other.
5)
Additional searchable
field-based indexes would include: Document number, U.S. current class,
current Cross reference classes, Application number, Appl. date, PCT
information, Application priority data (document listings),
International
class (as issued), and US patent references.
6) The
system would
have the ability to perform "one click" forward citation searches
on U.S. patents (list all patents that reference this patent),
and
also reverse citation searches from 1 to 3 levels deep (e.g.,
this patent
references
10 patents, and each of those patents reference more patents
who
also reference yet more patents... all returned as one set of search
results).
Hit-list
requirements
(display, sorting and paging):
7) Search
should
be
able
to return and track up to 2 million active documents with 50 to
500 items per page listed at a time with basic "line item"
details.
8) The
displayed
portion of the Hit List (50 to 500 at a time out of up to
2,000,000 returned in a search)
would be sortable by Document number, U.S. Class/subclass, and
Issue
Date.
9) The
detailed portion
must also be "slideable" up and down the total active hit list
(e.g.,
Next 100, Prev 100, Next 500, Prev. 500) with the ability to
re-sort
this smaller group (the displayed portion) as desired.
10)
Ability to turn
on and off additional details in the displayed section (50 to 500) of
the
hit list to include the Inventor's last name, primary examiner,
the
international class (as published) and at least 100 characters of the
title.
Online U.S.
classification listing
and other classification requirements
11) The
hit list
must be "properly sortable" by U.S. Class, which means numerically
by
class
first, then, alpha-numerically by subclass. The USPTO WEST
system, plus 2 commercial systems we are aware of, do not sort class and
subclass
correctly (this surprised us). They do a straight alphabetic
sort
(e.g.,
23/8 is before 2/54). This annoyed the professional searchers quit a
bit.
12)
When the class/subclass
listed by each displayed hit list item is clicked-on (mouse click),
it
must
pop-up a properly indented, subject hierarchy
classification listing (e.g., "dot
indented")
as assigned by the USPTO, in a scrollable, resizable
windows.
13) The
current class
information (Current U.S. Class and Cross Reference classes) on all
documents
and the pop-up class listings must be updated at least quarterly (4
times/yr)
from the USPTO Class subscription data.
System Interface
type and Text/Image
display requirements
14)
The
system
would
work across the Internet or an intranet using a popular late
model
browser with large LCD Monitors (20 inch).
15)
Like the WEST
system, and unlike the public USPTO Internet search system, image pages
must be easily displayed in the browser with no special graphics
plug-in. In other words, the system must convert patent image pages
into native
Internet graphics formats (on the fly) for high speed display (PNG, JPG
or GIF).
16)
Each of the patents/applications
in the detailed section of the hit-list (the current 50 to 500 out of
up
to 2 million found in the search) must have a button (a link) that will
display the full text (if available) in a dedicated window, and another
link that will display the image pages (if available) in another
dedicated
window. In fact, any patent text displayed must have active links for
the
US references to allow instantaneous display of that patent's full
text.
17) A
text only mode
should be selectable where the searcher can click one button and
display
the full text of the next (or previous) patent in the hit list (e.g.,
continuously
press next until all patents in the list have been displayed).
18) An
image only
mode should be selectable where the searcher can click one button and
display
the first image page of the next (or previous) patent in the hit list,
and button that also move you to the next or previous page in the
current
patent image file.
Auxiliary
functions for saving
and managing list of documents and searches
20)
Searchers
must
be
able to create managed lists of documents with the ability to
easily
add or delete documents found in the hit-list to these managed lists
(we
call these lists collections).
23) Be
able to easily
order a "collection" of the documents in a format such as multipage TIF
or PDF delivered to the workstation where the browser is running
(via a standard download link FTP or HTTP for things like
recording
onto CD or DVD media, or to print for reporting purposes.).
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