PatInformatics - A diary of New Technology

The term patinformatics is borrowed from the names of some of the common technological fields such as bioinformatics, cheminformatics. The term patinformatics is used to define the process of analyzing patent documents to uncover the trends and relationships camouflaged amongst them. Commonly computational methods or computer software are used to study the patent documents. Patinformatics could be considered as macro level analysis as opposed to bioinformatics where in the biological data are analyzed on a one-on –one basis. But since 80% of technical knowledge is embedded in patents and there are 35 million patents available for study, analysis worldwide, it is not feasible to adopt one-to-one analysis approach. However the concept of micro level analysis could also be employed provided the amount of data to be studied is confined in few patent documents. But the requirements of accuracy and precision remain unaltered for both types of analysis. Micro level analysis could be performed with the aid of computer software, but macro level analysis do require human intervention and better intellectuality on the part of people who study the patent documents. The term patinformatics is said to include all macro level analysis process including

• Patent intelligence – the process of using the patent information to identify the technical capabilities of an organization and to build a competitive, strategic technical plan.

• Patent Mapping – the process of utilization of published patent data to create a graphical representation of the art pertaining to a specific subject area or an invention.

• Patent citation analysis – the process of studying patent citations to determine a patent’s value and also to identify potential licensing partners and to obtain leads based on the citation of an organization’s patent by another organization which may or may not belong to the same market space