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How will old "backfile" data be handled?

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From 1 January 2006, all intellectual property offices will be obliged to use the symbols of the 8th, revised edition of the IPC (IPC8) for any patent documents they publish.

One of the main new features in future will be that, whenever the IPC is revised, all documents, even those published many years ago, will be reclassified. In other words, the current edition of the IPC will allow users to make complete searches, regardless of a document's publication date. To achieve this, all documents published before 2006 must be assigned an IPC classification in accordance with the new 8th edition. This would normally require an enormous investment; fortunately, however, a number of IP offices already use classification systems that work with reclassification or that use up-to-date concordance with the most recent IPC edition:

• The EPO uses ECLA, a classification system based largely on the current edition of the IPC.
• The Japanese Patent Office uses the FI classification system, based on various editions of the IPC, but increasingly being brought into line with the latest edition. A concordance table exists that maps all FI entries to the latest IPC edition.
• The German Patent and Trade Mark Office reclassifies a large part of its documentation to the latest edition of the IPC.
• The Russian Patent Office has parts of its documentation reclassified or is planning to do so.

The procedure for allocating current IPC classes to documents in the backfile will involve the following steps:

• The EPO will adapt ECLA to IPC8 as far as possible.
• Concordance tables will be created in order to map ECLA entries to IPC8 groups.
• Using these tables, all documents bearing ECLA classifications will receive corresponding IPC8 classifications.
• For documents where ECLA-IPC mapping is not possible or would not give satisfactory results, the German Patent and Trade Mark Office will be asked to deliver their classification data to the MCD.
• The JPO will deliver IPC data for Japanese patent documents, derived from the FI-IPC concordance table.
• The Russian Patent Office will deliver IPC data for Russian and Soviet patent documents, where available. Other offices have announced their intention to do the same for at least a part of their national document collections.
• All these IPC classifications will be propagated to all members of the “simple” patent family, ie to all patent documents with the same priority data as the document that was classified by the processes described above. In this way, even documents of countries that do not actively reclassify will receive IPC8 classifications as long as a patent family member exists in one of the reclassified collections.
• A number of the remaining documents will have IPC symbols from older editions that are still valid in IPC8. These symbols will be transformed into IPC8 symbols and stored as “new” IPC.
• Documents that cannot not be reclassified by any of the measures above will be collected and sent to their respective publishing offices.
• After some time, the EPO will attempt to derive a valid IPC8 classification from the “old” IPC of the documents that remain unreclassified, eg by reducing IPC 1 - 7 classifications that are no longer valid to main group symbols and storing them, if valid in IPC8, as “new” IPC in the MCD.

In this way it will be possible to assign IPC8 to most patent documents. These classifications will be stored in a central database called the Master Classification Database (MCD) maintained by the EPO.

In order to avoid confusion between “old” and “new” IPC classification symbols, the MCD will store the “new” IPC in separate fields. “Old” IPC classification symbols (editions 1-7) allotted to documents will not be deleted and will remain accessible.

Obviously such a massive undertaking will take some time to complete. However, a major part of the world’s patent documents, including the PCT minimum documentation, should have IPC8 classifications by the end of 2005.

Example of ECLA-IPC8 concordance table