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Does the classification philosophy ever change?
In the past, classifiers have focussed on the claims of a patent document, which was appropriate in the days when most intellectual property offices published granted patents only. Nowadays, most offices publish patent applications before they are examined. This means that the content of the claims at the time of publication does not necessarily reflect the “real” invention or all the material that one would like to retrieve in a search.
Under the reformed IPC, patent offices are recommended to classify not only the content of the claims, but also other important and possibly inventive aspects of the documents found, for example, in the description, examples or drawings. All such important features are to be classified as “invention information”.
Other content in a document, which, whilst being of lesser importance, may still have some search value, can be classified as “additional information”, as in the current IPC.
Up till now, the distinction between “invention information” and “additional information” was not stored in most patent databases and has only been visible on the printed document (separated by the “//” sign), but in future it will also be reflected in the databases, enabling more accurate searches.