The REGNET research project proposes to develop an information infrastructure to enhance the access, retrieval and transparency of government regulations, in particular in the area of patents. Almost all manufacturing and engineered products as well as the processes involved in inventing and producing such products need to comply with regulatory requirements. Patent laws and related issues are complex and voluminous, and can be disproportionately burdensome, hindering technological and business innovations, particularly to small businesses. Information technology (IT) has the potential to mitigate and help solve many of these complicated issues and enhance public understanding.
Intellectual Merit
Government regulations are now available online. However, most of current online portals are primarily designed for displaying the information and are difficult to be used for further processing. The information service infrastructure proposed for REGNET includes repositories as a base and, more importantly, tools to locate, merge, compare, and analyze the information. This service infrastructure will exploit in an intelligent way the communication and computational resources that are now widely available to the public. Seven tasks are planned: (1) textual parsing and storage, (2) semi-structured, indexed storage, (3) means to resolve semantic ambiguities, (4) cross-referencing appropriate for automated retrieval of relevant documents, (5) comparative analysis of related regulatory documents, (6) on-line compliance assistance and checking of governmental regulations, and (7) needs assessment and impact analysis. New and innovative search and analysis techniques will be developed to help disseminate regulatory data and allow finding and comparing multiple sources of related legal and regulatory information.
Broad Impacts
IT systems for legal and regulatory purposes are being rapidly developed. The social and legal impacts of such online regulation systems and compliance assistance tools as well as their effects on the regulatory process will be studied.
Regulations and patents play a very important role in the world of innovation, from research and development (R&D) to product design and to commercialization through start-up and large companies. Although government regulations and scientific documents are now readily available online, they are isolated and siloed. Despite significant advances in information retrieval technologies, the task of gathering IP (intellectual property) related information remains largely a manual, laborious, inaccurate, and expensive process. If such information can be made readily accessible in the form useful for the public, it will foster a culture that encourages innovation and beneficially impact our economy, our businesses and our industry developments. The objective of this research is to develop methodologies and supporting tools that facilitate locating, merging, comparing and analyzing patent-related documents. Technical Merits Information search plays a very critical role in the patent system and, if not done properly, can be costly due to litigation and lost revenue. Current information retrieval methodologies are useful when searching a single type of domain. For example, administrative laws, patents, court proceedings and scientific publications, each constitutes a different domain. The differences in semantics and syntactic structures of the information among the domains pose significant challenges to traditional search tools. This research has developed a novel knowledge-driven approach for information retrieval across heterogeneous information sources. Specifically, a patent system ontology and supporting tools have been developed to facilitate and partially mechanized the retrieval of patents and related information. With the ontology, patent information sources can be related through cross references among the documents. Scientific domain knowledge (in this study, a biomedical ontology) is employed to facilitate finding similar documents. By taking advantage of the document structures, related terms and references, hidden similarities between domain-related documents can be revealed. The technical quality of the research outcomes has been well recognized by academic scholars, researchers and practicing professionals in the digital government arena. During the course of the project, the investigators have received best research and practice paper awards in three prominent international conferences in this field; they include the 2008 9th International Conference on Digital Government Research, the 2010 4th International Conference on Electronic Governance and the 2012 6th International Conference Electronic Governance. Broader Impacts The complexity and the volume of documents involved in patent filings, acquisition, enforcement, and valuation can be disproportionally burdensome and hinder technological and business innovations, particularly to small businesses. This research can have significant impacts in reducing transaction costs and lowering the barriers between government agencies, businesses and the public. The outcome of this research has the potential in transforming current intellectual property practice and in the digital government and e-commerce spheres, particularly as the US Patent System switches to "first invertor-to-file" application process enacted by the Leahy-Smith American Invents Act (AIA). Indeed the transformative nature of this research has already been cited by legal scholars as "an important first step toward a much-needed solution to a pervasive [patent litigation] problem (see http://writtendescription.blogspot.com/2011/11/jay-kesan-et-al-developing.html). The research has drawn significant interests from legal scholars in computational laws and professionals from patent users. The research project has brought together researchers from law, computer science and engineering. This interdisciplinary effort is fundamental to the success of the project as well as to provide opportunities to educate students to gain better understanding of the legal and social issues related to information technology as well as a broad range of career opportunities. Among the students who have involved in this research and other related projects, the Post-Doctoral student is now a Science Fellow at the Natural Resources Defense Council, the PhD student has become a faculty member at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, the Engineer Degree Graduate student has joined an Internet start-up company and the undergraduate student will be continuing her graduate education at Stanford University. Furthermore, the research results have been disseminated to legal scholars in the computational law domain, to the professional patent users, and to government representatives (for example, at the USPTO where the co-PI at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign served as the Thomas A. Edison Scholar in 2012).
