Most significant patent information challenges today comes from the user side, since:
· the increasing diversity of users, as in R&D and company management, requires the integration of additional information besides patent documents
· the focus on new valued added tasks, beside patent searching, as patent analysis and patent monitoring, requires new functions too,
· the increasing number of people accessing patent information requires more intuitive user interfaces
· today pressure to more efficient information and knowledge management suggests at least to partially automatise some low level functions
From the architectural point of view, these requirements suggest to use a clearer separation between the data bases and the application, which is facilitated by the adoption of web services and of mash up architectures, and to extend the adoption semantic solutions in different process stages, from the search stage, to the patent list refinement stage to the patent analysis stage.
The full contribution accessed from HERE provides a more detailed list of challenges, including the increasing multilinguality of patent information, especially in Asian languages, and the increasing need of patent specific search benchmarks, in order to fairly assess different solutions.
The full contribution accessed from http://www.intellipatent.eu/Documents/PatentInformatics2.pdf includes also a list of current research trends.
Web information sites suggested as most relevant are:
http://www.slis.tsukuba.ac.jp/~fujii/pat_proc_pub.html a directory of events and papers about patent informatics, including references to the NTCIR workshops http://research.nii.ac.jp/ntci , to the ACL workshop on Patent Processing (http://www.slis.tsukuba.ac.jp/~fujii/acl2003ws.html ) , to the ACM SIGIR Workshop on patent retrieval (http://research.nii.ac.jp/ntcir/sigir2000ws )
(http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=PublicationURL&_tockey=%23TOC%235948%232007%23999569994%23650727%23FLA%23&_cdi=5948&_pubType=J&view=c&_auth=y&_acct=C000010078&_version=1&_urlVersion=0&_userid=128923&md5=1ec4fecb31ad11f5d7b94994f9e3bb12 ): a special issue on patent processing
http://www.ir-facility.org hosting a annual symposium for patent retrieval; presentations
http://www.patexpert.org the Patexpert EU funded project site
