Programme de la conférence

Superworkshop for power users (PDF, 32,8 KB)

Official opening

hosted by master of ceremonies, Roberts Ķīlis, Stockholm School of Economics, Riga, CV

Welcome by Aigars Kalvītis, Prime Minister of the Republic of Latvia (PDF, 40 KB)
Welcome by Alison Brimelow, President of the EPO
Welcome by Zigrīds Aumeisters, Director of the Latvian Patent Office (PDF, 38 KB)

Keynote speeches

Juris Ekmanis, President of the Latvian Academy of Sciences CV  (PDF,302 KB)
Innovation in Latvia

Latvia has been the birthplace and place of work of many prominent scientists and inventors. After restoration of the national indepence, Latvia's science faced the challenges typical to a small country. Latvia's accession to the European Union in 2004 coincided with the evolution of a national innovation system. The priority R&D areas have been identified and national legislation provides for an increase of state financing for R&D until the Lisbon target is achieved. 

Ruud Peters, Chief Executive Officer, Philips Intellectual Property & Standards CV (PDF, 521 KB)
China and IPR

European Patent Information (PDF, 38 KB)
Curt Edfjäll, Vice-President EPO

Major developments (PDF, 108 KB)
Wolfgang Pilch, Principal Director, EPO

Intellectual property strategies in China
Thomas Moga, Patent attorney and China expert CV  (PDF, 480 KB)

The strategic acquisition of patent protection in China requires a good understanding of the forms of patent protection available and of the steps required for efficiently securing such rights. Different industries require different approaches. The pending amendments to China's Patent Law may have an impact on strategic planning as well.  Many lessons can be learned from the strategies employed by Chinese innovators and their companies. Once registrations are obtained, resolutions of disputes and infringement charges must often be settled. In the larger picture, questions about the compliance of China's patent prosecution and enforcement policies with the TRIPS Agreement of the WTO occasionally arise. 

Focus on East Asia

Chinese patent information for Western users CV   (PDF, 623 KB)
Huabing Liu, Beijing Zhongxian Tuofang Scient Technology Development Co. Ltd

Japan and Korea have made some progress to meet western users' patent information needs. Chinese still has some problems: poor quality of English data; lack of robust machine translation and effective searching tools.

At this stage, commercial providers' efforts are focused on:

1. Improving the quality of machine translation. Human-aided machine translation can help to obtain understandable translation.
2. Inviting Chinese patent information experts to provide high-quality search service to overcome the language barrier.
3. Developing Chinese patent searching tools with more powerful functions and more integrated English data.

Zhongxian Tuofang, a company specialised in Chinese patent information, has been working on C-E MT and human-aided MT, based on an IPC-driven term-base with more than 3.5 million terms. They will launch a Chinese patent web service in English in the near future.

East Asian patent information - are we in paradise, east of Eden, or west of the sun? CV (PDF, 243 KB)
Bob Stembridge, Thomson Scientific

In her address "Maggots in Paradise" given to the IPI-ConfEx meeting in 2004, Ursula Schoch-Grübler stated that "globalisation means that patent information from Asian [...] countries is becoming increasingly important".  The volume of patents from East Asia, and in particular China, continues to create challenges. 

This presentation will review issues faced by commercial providers including data acquisition, translation methods, local language interfaces and associated costs. Information will be provided about how these issues are being addressed through enhanced coverage and treatment of East Asian patent information to answer the question of whether we are in the Garden of Eden, somewhere East of that, or headed West of the Sun.

The special challenge of East Asian legal status CV (PDF, 1.18 MB)
Irene Schellner, EPO

This presentation outlines the challenges of searching legal status information on Japanese, Chinese and Korean patent rights. Most western patent databases do not fully cover this legal status information, so what other resources are available?

The presentation looks at free sources of legal status data and addresses coverage, gaps in coverage and the availability of English information. Examples will illustrate what to be careful about when interpreting the data.

"A spy in the ivory tower?" CV  (PDF, 365 KB)
Ebe Campi, EPO

Crossing over to the EPO after having used patent information in industry for many years has been an eye opener to Ebe Campi. Examiners in the EPO are both users and producers of patent information, but their partners outside are patent attorneys, not information staff. It is therefore unavoidable that perception of each other's work is not completely based on sound knowledge. The presentation aims at creating a better understanding of the impact of patent information on the examiners' work. 

Workshops session 3 (repeats of earlier workshops)

16.00 - 17.30 hrs

90 minutes on EPO products - putting theory into practice (PDF, 956 KB)

A series of presentations will explain how the overall EPO strategy, and the reformulated patent information policy are affecting, and will affect, the EPO's patent information products. The adaptation of Register Plus in reaction to EPC 2000, fulltext data in esp@cenet, and online MIMOSA databases are a few examples of the material that will be discussed.

Pierre Avédikian, Ignacio Muñoz Ozores, Keri Rowles, Nigel Clarke and Davide Lingua, EPO

Insight
What can users expect from EPO databases in the longterm? CV (PDF, 644 KB)
John Bambridge, EPO

The EPO manages one of the world's largest digital repositories of public knowledge. A gold mine of information accessed daily by thousands of internal and external users through tools developed to serve both: high user expectations and efficient electronic workflow. Challenges like the increased international data exchange, continuously growing patent documentation, particularly from Asia, and the linked accessibility question are key elements we cannot neglect. This presentation will look at strategic issues in acquisition and quality policies: The core for a pro-active development of the future EPO databases with the aim to stay a reliable, high-quality resource. 

PATExpert: towards new generation patent processing services CV (PDF, 784 KB)
Leo Wanner, ICREA Research Professor at the Department of Communications and Information Technology, Pompeu Fabra University, Barcelona, Spain

The EC-funded PATExpert project will change THE patent processing PARADIGM from textual (viewing patents as text blocks enriched by pictures or drawings, or sequences of words) to semantic (viewing patents as multimedia knowledge objects). This presentation will cover the semantic (content) representation framework designed for the PATExpert service and briefly discuss three types of technique currently being researched:

• techniques operating on content representation
• techniques deriving content representation from given patent material
• techniques facilitating better access to the content of patent material for the human reader 

EPC 2000 - what you need to know before 13 December CV (PDF, 50.3 KB)
Robert Cramer, EPO

The new facilities for applicants and new legal remedies under EPC 2000 will create additional situations in which published data may subsequently be altered. Whereas relaxed filing requirements only apply to new applications, the more generous relief provisions for losses of rights will apply immediately, also to pending applications. 

EPC 2000 - what the EPO needs to do for users (PDF, 886 KB)
Stephen Adams, Magister Ltd

The introduction of the new European Patent Convention has obvious implications for the work of prosecuting patent applications before the EPO, and it will affect the work-flow of applicant companies and individuals. The ultimate impact is still unknown, but some estimate of the scale of the changes can be inferred by considering existing practices in other jurisdictions. 

EPO three-O CV (PDF, 541 KB)
Jeremy Scott, EPO

Happy 30th birthday, EPO. Over the past 30 years, the EPO has witnessed tremendous changes, especially in the documentation searched, and how a search is carried out. This presentation describes the most important developments in EPO documentation, classification and search tools against the 30 year time line. It will also explore the impact of these developments on the type of search done, and the search report sent to the applicant. More specifically it will look at the following:

• paper only search
• ECLA vs. IPC
• EPOQUE
• computer based abstract and title search
• EPO synonym cards
• ICO codes and keywords
• BEST
• full text databases
• internet searching 

Summaries by David Barford (rapporteur) CV

Slides (PDF, 105 KB)

Report (PDF, 32 KB)

and workshop chairmen:

Workshop A: OPS and Web services

Slides (PDF, 34,6 KB) 

Report (PDF, 36 KB) 

Workshop B: EPC 2000 - the impact for searchers

Slides (PDF, 36,9 KB) 

Report (PDF, 15 KB) 

Workshop C: IPC and ECLA - what comes next?

Slides (PDF, 32,6 KB) 

Report (PDF, 30 KB) 

Workshop D: What should the priorities be for legal status data?

Slides (PDF, 37,7 KB)  

Workshop E: New tools for business use - what can the EPO contribute

Slides (PDF, 32,9 KB) 

Report (PDF, 20 KB) 

Workshop F: Chinese translations - a co-operation project for the patent community

Slides (PDF, 46,3 KB) 

Report (PDF, 48 KB) 

Special announcement: EPO Patent Information Conference 2008
Closing statement by EPO (PDF, 22 KB)