Programme

Official opening

Hosted by master of ceremonies, Andrew Hammond, European Patent Attorney

Welcome by Maud Olofsson, Deputy Prime Minister and Minister for Enterprise and Energy
Welcome by Manuel Desantes, Vice-President DG 5, European Patent Office 
Presentation (PDF, 75 KB)      
Welcome by Susanne Ås Sivborg , Director General of the Swedish Patent Office  

Keynote speech

High Quality of the Patent Database provides certainty to European companies such as Ericsson.                        
John Han, Vice-President, Patent Development, Ericsson AB

Ericsson believes that the evaluation and prosecution of patent applications is a co-operative process. Everybody's interests are best served by the existence of comprehensive patent data providing an accurate reflection of prior art. Advantages of this include making proper priority filing decisions, more accurate and reasonable claim rejections and corresponding claim amendments during the prosecution phase, more informed business decisions when making foreign filing decisions and making the overall filing "game plan", and providing all parties, including potential licensees and users of such patented technologies, with a better idea of the scope and clarity of issued claims and their patented technologies. 

Major developments in 2008

Patent information  - quo vadis?
Richard Flammer, Principal Director, EPO
Presentation (PDF, 86 KB)

The EPO's new Principal Director for Patent Information will talk about European patent information and the role of quality in the patent information landscape. The forthcoming survey on the use of patent information in Europe, and the input from the experts at this conference, will allow the EPO to plan its actions with a new level of confidence that the direction is the right one. 

EPO patent information set to move up a gear
Nigel Clarke, Keri Rowles, Alfred Wenzel, Johannes Schaaf, Peter Paris, EPO
Presentation (PDF 1.8 MB)

The EPO will report some major product news during this presentation:

• a one-box search feature and full-text searching (EP and PCT documents) for esp@cenet
• progress on ESPACE Worldwide, which will offer MIMOSA-powered searches online in the EPO's worldwide data
• improvements in legal status coverage and strategy for new data acquisition (Russia, China and more...)
• EPO PATSTAT - the patent statistics database
• Making the EPO's patent data visible to internet search engines

Breaking the language barrier

How good are machine-translation techniques for patent searching?
Barrou Diallo, EPO
Presentation (PDF, 2.3 MB)

Machine translation has been developing rapidly in recent years; the EPO has been working on the use of machine-translation systems for more than 6 years, offering pioneering advances to its end-users. This presentation will look at recent developments in the field. It will highlight where the EPO's experience has shown that machine-translation is considered a useful tool for IP professionals, where particular difficulties lie and where the focus will be on future development work. It will also provide an update on the particular issue of translations of Chinese patent documentation and position current industrial developments in the context of scientific research studies.

Life after the London Agreement: what happens to European patents after grant?
Marjolaine Thulin, Awapatent
Presentation (PDF, 1.4 MB)

The EPC 2000 and the London Agreement have added new elements to the already somewhat complex life of an EPO granted patent. This presentation gives an overview of what happens to European patents after grant, followed by a review of the available sources of information on the fate of granted patents. This will be illustrated by examples of search results. A wish list concerning the legal status information on European patents after grant will also be presented for possible actions by the EPO and the patent offices of EPO member states.   

Focus on quality in patent information - part 1

What makes a high-quality patent application for the patent searcher?
Bettina de Jong, Shell
Presentation (PDF, 625 KB)

Patent quality is often defined by the degree of compliance with legislation and the level of assurance about the validity of granted patents. From a searcher's point of view, however, quality is an indication of how easy it is to retrieve and select patent publications. Patent offices aim for higher quality applications through better access to data, but what is the quality of this data? 

Down the quality street - does the quality of patent information really matter to the EPO?
Jeremy Scott, EPO
Presentation (PDF, 62 KB)

Given that applicants draft applications (seems logical), the scope for EPO examiners to improve the patent information quality from them is strictly limited. Moreover, given the power of the internal tools available to examiners, does the EPO really care about patent information quality provided externally. What steps can it take to ensure that the best quality data streams into the public arena ? Certainly search quality at the EPO has always been premium, but how does the EPO monitor and assure the quality of search reports?

From the EPO to a commercial service - can commercial providers add quality as well as value? (2 x 15 minute presentations)

1. Never mind the quality, feel the width!
Bob Stembridge, Thomson Reuters
Presentation (PDF, 228 KB)

Thomson Reuters processes over 35 000 patent documents per week, which require accurate translation and quality checks before processing. Processes for checking source data for consistency of information will be reviewed here to give an insight into the value provided by commercial providers, not just in producing high quality value-added secondary information, but in checking and correcting errors in primary information.

2. ISO 9001 for patents; quality for the people or for the professionals?
Linus Wretblad and Joni Sayeler, Uppdragshuset
Presentation (PDF, 2.5MB)

Setting fixed standards is essential towards improving the quality of patent data. But how do we define the parameters of quality for patent data and for whom; IP professionals or common users? This presentation will tackle the issue of how quality should be defined and discusses how a quality certification of patent collections may be achieved.

Fit for purpose - when is a search, or a searcher good enough?
Aalt van de Kuilen, Solvay Pharmaceuticals , B.V.
Presentation (PDF, 135 KB)

Although the use of patent information has increased over the last years, many people have serious doubts about the improvement of the quality of the searches and the searchers. This indicates already the two main variables in patent searching: the tools that are used and the competences of the searcher. These factors are related to the knowledge of the searcher and to personal behaviour. Training and certification of the searchers can improve the standard of patent searching.  

Focus on quality in patent information - part 2

Operating a high quality patent information service in a national patent office
Johan Winther, Swedish Patent Office (PRV)
Presentation (PDF, 42 KB)

Johan Winther, Head of Patent Information at the PRV, gives us a brief insight into how a national patent office tries to meet its customers' needs in the ever-changing world of patent information. Examples of activities that the PRV are undertaking to meet customer requirements and provide them with clearly presented patent information and related services will be presented.

Quality assurance in the EPO Patent Information Resource master databases
Miguel Albrecht, EPO
Presentation (PDF, 445 KB)

The EPO maintains a high quality database for prior-art searches. Before data is loaded onto the database, it is standardised, validated and, in many cases corrected. Between 2004 and 2007, the EPO performed 4.2 million quality improvements on 15.6 million newly added documents. In the same period, over 1.2 million manual corrections were made to the 22 million newly added citations and an equivalent number of corrections were performed through rules in software. A direct benefit of these corrections is that users have less documents to sift through in their searches. This presentation discusses the challenges of dealing with the growing volume of patents and complexity of data while maintaining a high quality standard.

When do patent offices accept internet as prior art?

Martin Müller, EPO
Presentation (PDF, 50 KB)

Martin Müller, an examiner at the EPO, will summarise the recent EPO case law - which raises questions over the effectiveness of the internet as a source of prior art - and related developments. 

Bart van Wezenbeek, Vereenigde
Presentation (PDF, 42 KB)