A little over ten years ago I thought the field of patent analysis could use a grand unifying theme to bring together all of the various types of analysis and work that people were doing in the area. Having seen the rise of bioinformatics and cheminformatics I thought that people not already in the field of patent information would relate to the idea of patinformatics.
I started with an article in Searcher Magazine called Patinformatics: Identifying Haystacks from Space and followed up with a short lived blog at patinformatics.com. In 2003 I also conducted a very successful workshop at the PIUG Annual Conference in Chicago called Patinformatics: Patent Analysis for Fun and Profit.
Then, due to various, very reasonable requests, from the people who were providing me with paychecks I personally put Patinformatics on the back burner. I found the time to write a highly cited article for World Patent Information called Patinformatics: Tasks to Tools and continued to talk about patent analysis in a variety of international forums but I had to stop writing the blog.
During this time I was also fortunate to help build a few patent analysis tools which are still available to this day and was very happy to share my experience in using patent analysis tools in order to build a new one.
Now, with the 10th anniversary of Patinformatics upon us, I find myself able to devote more time to working with the patent analysis community and working to continue growing the patinformatics community. 2013 is also the International Year of Statistics so it seems like a fortuitous time to reboot Patinformatics.com and launch Patinformatics, LLC. The following is from the home page of the new Patinformatics.com:
The term patinformatics was coined in 2002 to provide a recognizable phrase to encompass the various analytical methods used to analyze patent information. Borrowed from the commonly know phrases cheminformatics and bioinformatics, patinformatics describes the science of analyzing patent information to discover insights, relationships and trends. Originally, the discipline focused on the statistical analysis of large amounts of patent information (macro-level analysis) but more recently it has been recognized that the analysis of small numbers or even single patents (micro-level analysis) is also a critical activity and should be incorporated into the idea of patinformatics.
This site serves three purposes, mostly through the patinformatics wiki, it will serve as a repository for community knowledge and shared expertise on patinformatics as a discipline. While the wiki will require a sign-up for editing purposes the information shared will be made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported license and can be freely used and shared with attribution and under the same conditons.
The site is also the home of Patinformatics, LLC an advisory firm established to assist the members of the patinformatics community whether they be individual practitioners, database or tool builders, patent offices, universities or corporations. The Managing Director of Patinformatics, LLC is Anthony (Tony) Trippe. Tony is an influential thought leader in the patent analysis space and invented the term patinformatics.
Finally, this site will also host the Patinformatics Blog where members of Patinformatics, LLC and invited guests will share their experiences and thoughts on some of the most pressing topics associated with the analysis of patent information.
I can’t tell you how excited I am to be able to engage with the Patinformatics community on a more frequent basis. In addition to the resources available on Patinformatics.com I will also be actively tweeting on Twitter and will begin to engage more heavily with people on LinkedIn. I look forward to speaking and working with as many of you as possible as we work to continue bringing the benefits of patent analysis to as many fields and applications as possible.
