Meritorious patents are a principal currency of an innovation-driven society. They create an incentive for the production of novel inventions. But the integrity of the patent system is compromised when, as the Commissioner of Patents has noted, the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) lacks optimized informational resources to determine if a patent application reflects a new and non-obvious invention, as the law requires. To date, scientific researchers have been unable to help the USPTO find the information it needs. The arcane language of patent applications conveys insufficient information to enable effective communication among patent professionals and the community of scientists and others in the public who would otherwise provide valuable information and insight to the USPTO.
Tagging and visualization, two software-driven techniques that are used to enhance access to digital information, are in common use in commerce, but they have yet to be applied to a vast store of scientific information in the public sphere, including patents. Tagging is the process by which a keyword is assigned to an item of information; it describes the information and allows it to be readily searched (e.g. labeling photos on web-based photo-sharing services). By tagging different information with the same tag, associations can be made. Visualization refers to a variety of techniques for graphically representing relationships (e.g. graphical representations of census data or voting patters). These two tools of tagging and visualization open great opportunities for using science to unlock essential information and make it available in a useable form that will benefit government, the scientific community and the public.
The Open Patent project, based at New York Law School's Center for Patent Innovation, studies the application of tagging and visualization tools in the context of patents. This project builds on New York Law School's Peer-to-Patent pilot program, which it created in 2006, and launched in 2007, in cooperation with the USPTO to improve the quality of information available to patent examiners through on-line public participation. Using social networking tools, the Peer-to-Patent website enables self-selecting technical experts to identify and submit bibliographic information, known as prior art, relevant to examining the claims of the patent application. Data from the first year of Peer-to-Patent demonstrates that the public can, and does, contribute information that assists patent examiners in more effectively determining patent eligibility.
Using data developed through the Peer-to-Patent project, the Open Patent project takes as its premise that, for the patent system to continue to promote science and innovation, new scientific tools are necessary to enable: patent examiners to understand the claims of an application for which a patent is sought; competitors to know the scope of a granted patent in order to innovate around it; and the scientific and technical public to find and discuss patents related to their research.
The Open Patent project takes advantage of information generated by reviewers in the Peer-to-Patent project to study the effects of user-generated tagging and visualization on the exchange of information in the patent process. Experts from law, political science, information and computer science, library science and design are engaged in developing user interfaces for the development of these tags. The new approach should enable patent examiners and the participating public to readily define and perceive patterns of association among information relevant to patents. The hypothesis to be tested is whether enabling public tagging of patents and applications will: 1) enable scientific research communities to develop knowledge bases of patents relating to their area of research; 2) produce a demonstrable increase in rates of public participation by the scientific community in the USPTO public patent review program; and 3) enable patent examiners to identify more relevant information to assist with the patent examination process.
Broader Impacts: This research has ramifications for improving the quality of issued patents and the exchange of information between a government agency and the scientific public, on an international basis. In addition, this research develops new models, analytic tools and datasets that can also be applied in the science policy decision-making process in many other domains.
