PATENT & DATA ANALYTICS SOFTWARE: KEYHOLE

Keyhole Patent Analytics:

Which patents read closest to a targeted patent?

Keyhole (named after the Keyhole Nebula) is an easy-to-use patent analytics tool that answers the question "Which patents read closest to a targeted patent?" It provides spot-on patent-to-patent correlation by analyzing textual and contextual relationships in the title, abstract, claims and specification in a targeted group of up 5000 patents. Keyhole provides users with an easy-to-use 3-D visualization of the relationships of the patents.

What Problem Does Keyhole Solve

Intellectual asset managers are routinely tasked with several problems that Keyhole helps solve.

Prior Art:
If there is prior art in the USPTO database on a particular patent, keyhole will find it. Targeted patents are displayed along with all other related patents in its contextual vicinity.

Bundling Strategies:
Keyhole identifies patents in a portfolio that may be bundled in a single sales or licensing offering.

Defensive or Offensive Purchasing:
Keyhole uncovers offensive and defensive purchasing opportunities in the USPTO database by finding patents that read on products.

Trend Spotting:
Keyhole spots trends in competitive portfolios using its time-gradient feature.

Product Clearance:
Keyhole gives you confidence that your freedom-to-operate studies are robust and well-researched.

Keyhole fills an analysis gap urgently needed by IP managers. The potential uses for Keyhole are only limited by the creativity of the user. So, when you need to know which patents read closest to a targeted patent, use Keyhole.

Using Keyhole is Easy:

Keyhole is easy-to-use. It only takes 15 minutes of practice before users are up and running like pros. It is the perfect tool for even the most junior member of an IP management team, and leads to answers to important problems IP departments face. In the hands of an expert user, Keyhole uncovers opportunities faster than other analytics tools on the market.

Keyhole does not require the formulation of complicated queries and analyses of keyword and weighting schemes.

1. Choose the set of patents that you want to analyze using simple Boolean logic.
2. Then click ANALYZE.
3. Keyhole does all the hard work for you. It calculates the correlations and relationships of all the patents in the target patent set.

TAEUS routinely provides a number of patent analysis services where we need to know the answer to the simple question posed above: Which patents read closest to a targeted patent? Patent analytics has come a long way in the last several years; still no commercially available tool could consistently and easily answer that question. The solution required a unique approach to the problem.

As a consequence TAEUS developed Keyhole. Keyhole started out as a research project to see if we could get meaningful results quickly and efficiently. This research led to a version of the product that TAEUS has been using internally for almost five years. Today, we are turning Keyhole into a commercial product licensable by our clients.

How Keyhole Works:

The process involves a few short steps.

First the user creates a list of patents to be analyzed using traditional Boolean search techniques, narrowing down the full USPTO database by date range, assignee(s) and keywords.

Once the result set of interest is identified, usually from 250 to 5000 patents, the user clicks ANALYZE, and Keyhole performs a full-text index of every word in every patent in the targeted set.

In the third step, Keyhole compares the frequency, co-occurance and location of each word in each document to the frequency and location of the keywords in all other, 4999 patents in the targeted list. Keyhole then does the same analysis for patent two and compares it to all 4998 remaining patents and so on, until all patents are compared to all other patents in the targeted set. The result is millions of points of comparison. If keyhole stopped there, it would take a lifetime of human study to make sense of the data.

Therefore, the last step is to use various weighting and dimensional reduction techniques to reduce the millions of points of comparison to just three dimensions. The results are then plotted as dots in 3-D space providing a visual correlation of the patents according to their full-text structure.

Can I try Keyhole?

A trial version of Keyhole will soon be available as a web service located at www.taeus.com/keyhole. The trial version is well featured but limited to 250 patents.