Touch-Based Organization of Patent Collections

Abstract

The number of patent applications has been growing rapidly: in 2010 the patent application requests increased with 11% at the European Patent Office. It is important that patent examiners can efficiently compare new applications with published patents. Patent examiners review the list of relevant patents, returned by a search query, one at a time using the current tools. There is no overview of the patents and time is wasted when the best document is the last in the list. An overview of the patent collection can provide insights into which patents can be skipped and which should be read in detail. This work proposes an Organization Viewer for reviewing a collection of patents. It is based on the research prototype TouchPat which uses multi-touch interaction and displays the patents in a static 2D grid. In the Organizational Viewer, the patents can be organized manually in a spatial layout using a new multi-touch gesture set and Stacks. In addition, this work examines how automatic organization using the Local Affine Multidimensional Projection (LAMP) technique can also support the user. These new organization techniques are evaluated with twelve patent examiners at the European Patent Office using the think-aloud protocol. The results of these evaluation show that an overview is a valuable addition to the work of patent examiners and that the value of an overview for patent examiners depends on personal preferences as well as their domain of expertise. The TouchPat prototype and the evaluation transcripts give insight into the features that can improve the process of reviewing relevant patents.