NEWS

Minesoft and RWS Group introduce sophisticated new Legal Status review tools and a Similarity Search to PatBase, the global patent database

The issue of access to current, interpretable legal status data has been high up on the agenda of many patent conferences, user group meetings and online forums since the end of 2013, and enhanced legal status functionality has been developed as a priority for PatBase.

Is this patent active?
The advanced new functionality speeds up the review of complex patent legal status information, displaying a high level of detail and allowing users to drill down to pin-point specific events e.g. occurring in a specific country or selection of jurisdictions or in a certain month. The augmented Timeline provides a fully interactive graphical display of legal events over the lifetime of a patent application with colour-coding to indicate the event group – is it dead or alive for example? As with the concise legal status Table, the information displayed can be tailored to requirements with filter options, and links are available to view abstracts or to check on current status at the national patent office registers.

Patent ownership
With company mergers and acquisitions and transfer of patent ownership increasingly common occurrences, the new Reassignment Browser is a significant new addition to the legal status toolset in PatBase. It neatly displays the entire history of ownership of a patent, also referred to as Chain of Title in the USA. The most recent reassignment event only for each patent can be shown, or the table can be expanded to display the whole chain of events. Legal Status information is an essential component of a patent search, and these latest enhancements are designed to make it easier than ever to ascertain the status of a patent in order to make informed business decisions.

Similarity Search
Released at the same time as the Legal Status tools, another popular search function - the Similarity Search - has been added to PatBase at the request of users, having been introduced to the end-user interface PatBase Express in late 2013. This intelligent semantic-based search option enables similar patents to be rapidly retrieved based on a section of text input from a patent or another scientific document imported into PatBase from other sources.

www.discoverpatents.net
www.minesoft.com
www.rws.com