D -- Patent Applications Analysis Tools for the US Patent and Trademark Office

The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) is conducting market research for patent application analysis tools for automating a wide range of common patent analysis tasks enabling users to analyze patent applications and extract meaningful information/intelligence. This market research shall be conducted at NO COST TO THE GOVERNMENT. This announcement is a Request For Information (RFI), not a solicitation announcement for proposals, and accordingly, no contract will be awarded from this announcement. No reimbursement will be made for any costs associated with providing information in response to this announcement or any follow-up information requests. Strong relationships with industry are a priority of the USPTO, and the USPTO wishes to express its appreciation in advance to all organizations that choose to provide information in accordance with this information request.Background The United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) is an agency in the U.S. Department of Commerce (DOC) with its headquarters presently located in Alexandria, Virginia. The mission of the USPTO is the examination and issuance of patents and the examination and registration of trademarks. The USPTO serves the interest of inventors and businesses with respect to their inventions and corporate products, and service identifications. It also advises and assists the bureaus and offices of the Department of Commerce and other agencies of the Government in matters involving intellectual property. Currently the USPTO databases house about 7 million patents and over 30 million documents comprising 19 terabytes of storage with 6,000 internal users and 1,500 concurrent public users. There is an ongoing need to examine patent applications, maintain patent quality, and perform patentability analysis. ALL ANALYSIS TOOL VENDORS ARE ENCOURAGED TO RESPOND TO THIS RFI. USPTO is considering multiple analysis tools to aid examiners. It is highly desirable that analysis software products be web-based and platform independent. The following interest list is not inclusive of all analysis capabilities being sought for consideration. Analysis Capabilities Sought But Not Limited To: 1. Improve retrieval of relevant documents by employing latent semantic analysis techniques and/or conceptual search technology (i.e. concept-based search capability), taxonomy or equivalent. 2. Provide data mining software for analyzing trends in data. Data mining of numeric data, categorical data, mixed data, sequence and documents. 3. Provide text mining that enables optimization of information processing by transforming text into data that can be analyzed for information extraction or automatic classification of documents. - Improve text mapping, which involves clustering or categorizing documents based on the major concepts that are contained within. - Create lists of clusters categorizing the documents. 4. Use advanced semantic, statistical and structural tagging technologies to tag critical information buried within documents. Also, tag any textual content for re-use. 5. Provide for Claims Analysis and performing claim searching as follows: a. Application Claim Tree Processing capability with Hierarchal GUI presentation of a Claims tree: - Assist an examiner in quickly identifying restrictions; - Show or Hide dependent claims on all outline levels in the entire claim tree; - Provide claim tree versioning to document the original claim tree and claim trees for subsequent actions and amendments; and - Provide ability to annotate claim trees. b. Automatically highlight claims, which may be subject to rejections based on: - 35 U.S.C. 112 2nd paragraph (vague and indefinite, or improper claim language, improper Markush Language, improper Jepson claims) - 35 U.S.C. 112 1st paragraph (new matter-if linked to searching the instant specification) - non-statutory subject matter (e.g. 35 U.S.C. 101 issues) c. Automate Double Patenting/Interference searches - link to USPTO search databases and provide a result set of all applications that have similar claim language. - Automatically generate an Inventor/Assignee search with result set. - Identify the key words used in the claim set and provide examiners with draft Interference searches. d. Provide automated claim checks to identify discrepancies that are used to denote grammar, punctuation or awkward language (translation from a foreign document). e. Parse claim set to check for multiple dependencies such as claim 4 depending from 1 or 2 or 3. 6. Perform real-time, iterative searches of patent data including patent citation search and display. Iteratively search through generations of patent references and view forward and backward patent references at the same time. 7. Ability to develop a custom search loaded with trade journals, all the patent references, all the foreign art, and having references viewed and scrolled through as quickly as 0.5 seconds per page. 8. Interface with existing USPTO automated information systems and search tools which includes but not limited to EAST, WEST, NPL, MPEP Insight, Classification Insight, OACS, eDAN, PLUS, etc. 9. Search Strategies Profiles to provide the ability to define search strategy once and then execute the search in multiple systems without having to spend time reformatting (transforming) the search criteria (input) for each and every system. The template can further insure consistent prior art searches by standardizing search strategies. - Integrated user customizable search thesaurus - Relevancy-ranked results - Boolean and advanced Boolean searching - Proximity searching - Truncations with left, right, and internal - Automatic plurals - British equivalents and abbreviation equivalents - Transparent seamless search integrator that can be used by all designated systems 10. Product should incorporate full/ perpetual search session history. 11. Provide flexible analysis results export. 12. Provide full-text retrieval. 13. Provide image analysis capability. 14. Be easily accessible by all examiners and will scale to at least 6,000 USPTO and 1,500 Public users concurrently. 15. Prefer that software will run on and not impact the existing hardware platform. The analysis tool should be compliant with the USPTO Strategic Information Technology Plans posted at http://www.uspto.gov/web/offices/cio. Additional Information USPTO may request a demonstration and information exchange meeting with individual respondents based upon interest in applicability of the capability submitted. Please indicate if your product is on the GSA Schedule or can be obtained through another government vehicle. Suggested Response Format: Product Name Product Description Product Capabilities Product Performance Product Patent Analysis Concepts and Technology Government Agencies using technology Cost and Schedule Estimates Corporate Expertise Product Security