Innovation and Rights - Developing Biomedical Devices: Design, Innovation and Protection - page 46

The data available in the various databases and the search capabilities may vary
considerably, ranging from the simple bibliographic or keyword search (for exam-
ple, the Patent Abstract of Japan — PAJ-database) to the retrieval of information
unavailable elsewhere. 21
In addition to search, many national offices offer services such as the possibil-
ity to store on disk patent texts and information on legal status.
The EPO and the USPTO 22 also provide access to the register that contains data
relating to the prosecution of patent applications.
PATENTSCOPE ® , the portal of WIPO, allows searching more than 2 million
international (PCT) patent applications and graphically displaying the results on
the basis of some simple data such as publication date, main inventor, applicant,
IPC classification (see Fig. 3.4 ).
Professional systems offer more possibilities of search and retrieval of data (in
terms of both number and type of stored documents and searchable classifica-
tions 23 ) and especially of statistical analysis of the results. The use of titles and
rewritten summaries adds value.
3.4.2 Patent Classification
The classification of patents means to organize, catalogue and index the technical
content of such documents so as to be able to identify and search them easily and
accurately.
Patent literature is actually so broad that the retrieval of information is hard
without the aid of classification.
The examiners of national and international patent offices (the EPO, 24 the
USPTO, and so on) are the ones which give one or more classification codes 25 to
patent applications.
Although the international patent classification (IPC) is the most widely used,
other types of patent classifications exist, for example the Cooperative Patent
Classification (CPC), the United States (USPC), the Japanese [(FI— File Index ) the
F - terms ( File forming terms )] classifications, and so on. In any case, all of them
have a very large number of categories (see Table 3.2 ).
21 In the database of the Canadian Intellectual Property Office (CIPO) alone, bibliographic
searches on Canadian patents registered since 1869 can be performed.
22 The USPTO database was the first one to be accessible online since 1994; four years later, the
EPO followed the example of the United States with Espacenet.
23 HGJFH.
24 EPO examiners classify not only patents, but also technical and scientific papers.
25 Depending on the complexity of an invention, the number of IPC classes may be considered
as the indication of the complexity of an invention and it is related to the number of claims and
above all to the number of pages.