DATA MINING & WAREHOUSING USING XPAT SOFTWARE

Search Millions of Unstructured Documents with Speed, Accuracy, and Flexibility

XPAT gives IP Managers the power to uncover powerful business intelligence opportunities from enormous groups of unstructured data. It allows researchers to apply their own information in their searches, combined with data from USPTO and other patent databases, competitor’s datasheets, user manuals, and websites in a variety of new, flexible and innovative ways. It empowers investigators with faster and more comprehensive data management, organization, intelligence, discovery and analysis.

What is Unstructured Data?
Unstructured data is the information that IP managers are bombarded with on a daily basis. Data from websites, downloadable PDFs, user manuals, documents that can be scanned, and text or Word documents are examples of unstructured data. In other words, unstructured data is information that is not contained in a database, and that is easily accessible for fast information retrieval. Querying this hodgepodge of information in real time was virtually impossible before XPAT.

What Problems Does XPAT Solve?

The potential uses for XPAT are only limited by the creativity of the user. Some examples include:

Prior Art Searches
Scan thousands of documents, manuals and white papers and search for keywords contained in a patent leveraged against you. Conversely, before initiating a licensing campaign, you can assess the risk for invalidation by prior art using the same type of analysis.

Licensing Opportunities
Datasheets and documents for competitor’s products can be mined and matched up with keywords contained in your patents.

Patent Mining
If you need to shore up your patent portfolio in a technology area, XPAT can help you find patents you might wish to purchase.

Portfolio Analysis
Portfolio mapping provides IP Managers with baseline structure of how each patent fits into their larger portfolio. A portfolio map is not static, however. Its relevance changes as new patents and applications are created. Even more importantly, the ideal portfolio map is a function of the problem you are investigating. Patents that may be considered outliers in a general analysis, may sit squarely in the sweet spot of a different investigation if the question is posed slightly differently. XPAT provides you the power to refine a patent portfolio analysis on the fly.

Product Analysis
The work truly begins when a targeted product is found to be using the technology claimed in a patent. Targeting products is an exhaustive task for any IP Manager. XPAT greatly simplifies the research required by treating product datasheets, scanned/OCR’ed user manuals and website as if they were contained in a structured searchable database.

Freedom to Operate
XPAT gives you the power to pose a series of questions and continually refine your search. XPAT provides you with a high level of confidence that you can practice your invention, or must take a license, or design around a particular patent.

Patentability Search
When deciding whether to pursue a patent application or not, you can mine the USPTO and other patent databases for patentability, but it doesn’t stop there. XPAT searches websites, datasheets, in addition to patents to help you decide whether to move forward. Furthermore, drafting the application will be facilitated by the work done by the XPAT tool.

Workgroup
Centrally located server used by a small group of researchers and engineers (Usually less than 50). The use is specific to that particular group. Data is centrally located along with automated mechanisms for data collection.

Some searches that XPAT empowers you to do:

• Boolean - find x and y or (z and not y)
• Proximity - find x within y words of z
• Term weighting - find x or y where x is more important than y
• Phonic - find words that sound alike
• Stemming - find variations – drive finds drives, driven, driver
• Numeric range - find numbers between 11 and 35
• Fuzzy - find misspelled works with sensitivity adjustment
• Concept/Synonym/Thesaurus - fast finds quick and rapid as well
• Metadata searching – search on data “about” the documents such as author, subject, case ID, location, department
• Date range searching – find all documents within a date range
• Limit searching to one or more sub-folders

Data Location and Collection
Data resides on a central server which has crawler and manual drag-and-drop input functionalities. Data can be collected using the web crawler, output from other tools, and centrally drag and dropping files. The data can also be collected through a “Smart” folder that is monitored by the system to input new data as it is stored there. All data can be “tagged” to allow for a higher order association lending a knowledge and information component to the raw data.
Usage

The day-to-day usage of XPAT encompasses several different methodologies ranging from simple searching to complex Boolean operated additions and subtractions where a case is true or false and even where the words may be misspelled or even abbreviated.

All implementations of XPAT are searched locally with migrated data, collected from a myriad of sources.

For more information
To learn more how XPAT can help your IP Department research mountains of data faster with more flexibility than ever before, contact your TAEUS Sales Manager or call TAEUS directly at 719-325-5000.