Update: the link for the survey has been updated to correct one of the questions.
The World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) has demonstrated an amazing commitment to the field of patent analytics over the past few years, and to date have participated in the following projects:
I am proud, and happy to have participated with WIPO on a number of these initiatives, and I can personally vouch for their desire to bring the power, and insights provided by patent analytics to a larger, worldwide audience. This is especially true for practitioners in developing countries who are looking for additional applications of patent information within their countries.
During the regional workshops there was discussion amongst the participants about open source tools that could be used for patent analytics. The commercial providers in this space have certainly been generous in their support of developing countries, but it was acknowledged that the additional use of open source tools would help advance the adoption of this discipline globally.
To support this effort Paul Oldham, Director at One World Analytics made the following request today via LinkedIn:
Dear All,
Patent researchers and professionals are increasingly using open source and free software tools as part of their patent analysis work. We are working to develop a WIPO Manual on open source and free software tools with support from the WIPO Secretariat. The idea is to identify existing tools and develop materials that will help researchers and professionals to work with these tools in common patent analysis tasks with a focus on developing countries.
We would like to ask for your help with understanding the tools that people are already using. We would also like to find out what difficulties people encounter in working with patent data and what people would like to see in the future.
To do this we have developed a short 10 minute survey here: https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/NFXGGKM . We would greatly appreciate it if you would participate in the survey. We will then anonymise the data and share the results with the group.
We are getting started with developing materials which will be hosted on GitHub to provide open access. People who are interested in contributing can also join in through GitHub or by emailing suggestions from the project home page. We have set up a project home page here: http://poldham.github.io while we develop the manual.
Many thanks in advance for participating.
Irene Kitsara, IP Information Officer at WIPO also made the following comments in association with the announcement:
We are looking for your inputs and invite you to share your experience with us! The results of the survey will feed into the Manual we are working on and will shed light on the experience and practices of the patent information user group with open source tools. We look forward to your inputs!
This is certainly a worthwhile endeavor for the patent analytics community, and I encourage my readers to participate in the survey. I did so this afternoon, and I can tell you that it will only take 10 minutes to complete, and it is well worth the effort if we can develop additional tools for the community to take advantage of.
