Report:QPAT/Major Recent Updates

Major Recent Updates

See the Intellogist update policies for more information.

January 2013

As of January 1, 2013, both QPAT and PatentExaminer have been discontinued, and the www.qpat.com and www.patexaminer.com URLs redirect to the Orbit.com portal.^[1]

November 2012

The Questel website gives the following information about transferring PatentExaminer files over to the Orbit portal:^[2]

We urge you to transfer your Patentexaminer files over to the Orbit portal as soon as possible if this has not already been done and make sure that the transfer is complete before December 31st, 2012. In order to do this, simply connect to www.orbit.com using your existing credentials and select the “Workfiles” module. Then confirm that you wish to transfer your archives to the new system. All information, including annotations, attachments and custom fields will be transferred in the new platform. Caution!! the transfer is irriversible!

May 2012

According to a presentation on the Questel website, Questel has created a partnership with DARTS-IP and will release a Global IP case law database containing:^[3]

• Over 230 thousand patent decisions covering 1,200 courts globally
  • Europe already covered
  • Summer 2012: USA, China
  • End of 2012: Brazil, India, and Australia
  • A number of countries are planned for 2013

New patent litigation/opposition tags, created with data provided by DARTS-IP, are also now available on the Orbit platform, with coverage of Asia, Europe, and US courts.^[3]

April 2012

The Questel website gives additional information about the discontinuation of QPAT:^[4]

This autumn, a major new release of Orbit will introduce the most powerful patent analysis & mapping solution ever. Later this year, a new version of our key FamPat database will be released, offering lots of enhancements. All such enhancements will trigger the closing of QPAT, as the service will no longer be compliant with the technologies we use now.

The official last day of QPAT and PatentExaminer will be December 31st, 2012.

Questel has announced that QPAT will be discontinued at the end of 2012.^[5] Questel is putting full and further development efforts towards the Orbit portal.

September 2011

This update has occurred since our last review. During our next scheduled update, this article will be revised to include a description of the newly added content and features.

According to the Questel website:^[6]

Questel, an online information service leader for over 40 years announced today the acquisition of Research Disclosure, subsidiary of Kenneth Mason Publication and historical player for «Defensive Publication».

«Defensive Publication consists in publishing an invention to establish a prior art preventing others from patenting the idea», explains Piers Mason CEO of KMP, «Questel appeared to us as the ideal buyer for the continuity of the service».

Through this investment, Questel wishes to offer its users an additional tool to enrich their intellectual property strategies.

«It is a straightforward and cost effective alternative to patenting where application and maintenance fees can be substantial» adds Charles Besson, Questel CEO, «Besides should the application be granted, which probability is rather low, the cost of defending a patent can be fearsome».

Besides, 50 years of defensive publications are an excellent Non-Patent-Literature source for prior-art needs and will be integrated into Fampat.

October 2010

This update has occurred since our last review. During our next scheduled update, this article will be revised to include a description of the newly added content and features.

Taiwanese Full Text In October 2010, Questel released a collection of full text Taiwanese published patent applications, sourced from the Taiwan Patent and Trademark Office. The searchable full text of these documents is produced by machine-assisted English translation. Native language Chinese full text was available for display only at the time of the release. Taiwanese "A" documents are available from 2010 forward, and a complete back file from 2003-2009 will be completely loaded by the end of the year. Bibliographic information (including abstracts) are available as English human translations for the 2003-2009 time period, and records from 2010 forward will consist fully of machine translated data until human translated biblio/abstract data is available to replace them.

The Taiwan full text data has been added into the FamPat family database, and is searchable alongside the other full text collections available in FamPat. The coverage has been added to each of Questel's major patent search products, and as an alternative may be accessed in the TWFULL file in Qweb and Questel on Imagination.

Korean Claims Questel had previously offered Korean bibliographic data and English abstracts in the FamPat file; machine-translated abstracts for Korean documents are added within 2-3 weeks of publication, and replaced by human translated abstracts as soon as they became available. Now Questel has added an English machine-assisted translation collection of bibliographic information and patent claims for Korean patent documents, sourced from the Korean Intellectual Property Office (KIPO). Coverage includes:

Bibliographic Coverage (in English): KR-A documents from 2000 KR-U documents from 2008 forward KR PCT Applications from 2009 forward

Claims are available in Korean from 2008 forward and English Machine Translations from 2010 forward. The native language Korean data was for display only at the time of this release. A backfile of English Machine translations from 2008 is still being loaded as of October 2010.

The collection is available in the FamPat file, and can also be accessed in the file KRCLMS on other Questel products.

March 2010

This update has occurred since our last review. During our next scheduled update, this article will be revised to include a description of the newly added content and features.

In March of 2010, Questel announced several major enhancements to their data collections on QPAT. These include:^[7]

• A new collection of full text Indian (IN) patent documents has been added back to 2005.
• Canadian (CA) patents in full text will be loaded onto the search platforms as of March 22, 2010. This will augment the current CA patent collection, which previously contained titles, abstracts, and claims.

Furthermore, there have been several recent developments in Questel's coverage that can be summarized here:^[7]

• The WO/PCT collection on Questel has been enhanced to include English machine translations of records originally published in non-Latin alphabet languages. English machine translations for PCT applications published in Russian, Japanese, Chinese, and Korean are now available in full text.
• Questel's collection of pre-1973 US patent full text has been "re-OCR'ed" (meaning treated again with Optical Character Recognition software), to improve its quality.

February 2010

This update has occurred since our last review. During our next scheduled update, this article will be revised to include a description of the newly added content and features.

According to the QPAT homepage:^[8]

FamPat now contains searchable full-text of EP, US, WO, Austrian, Belgian, Brazilian, Canadian, Swiss, Chinese, German, Spanish, French, English, Japanese, Russian, Danish, Finnish and Swedish publications.

October 2009

This update has occurred since our last review. During our next scheduled update, this article will be revised to include a description of the newly added content and features.

Questel launched its Orbit portal in October 2009,^[9] and this new portal may be viewed as a replacement for Questel's other web-based search products, QPAT and Qweb.

This update has occurred since our last review. During our next scheduled update, this article will be revised to include a description of the newly added content and features. In the meantime, an official summary of the new features may be found at http://www.questel.com/emailing/emailing_200910_Databases.htm.

In October of 2009, Questel made several major enhancements to its data coverage.

The first major development is that Questel has now integrated full text data sources into the FamPat family database. Previously, this database contained only family and bibliographic data and "key content," or key concepts from the patent extracted by semantic analysis. However, as of this new update, users are searching the full text of US published applications and granted patents, WO/PCT published applications, and EP published applications and granted patents, in addition to the "key content" excerpts that were already present in the database.

Questel also announced that it plans to progressively add other full text collections into FamPat, including Questel's USPATOLD file, which spans from 1920-1973, and collections from the following countries: Argentina, Austria, Belgium, Brazil, Canadian (Claims), Chile, China, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Great Britain, India, Japan, Korea, Mexico, Russia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland. Questel representatives state that the collection of full text Canadian patent claims will probably be the next data added to the FamPat file.

The second major development was the addition of five full text collections to the Questel platforms, including QPAT:

• Brazil (BR)
• Russia (RU)
• Denmark (DK)
• Finland (FI)
• Sweden (SE)

In addition, the release stated the following:

• Korean PCT document are now available in the PCTFULL file on Questel platforms
• Full text databases for Mexico, Chile, and Argentina are planned for release in November 2009
• The complete coverage of all Indian data hosted on Questel has been loaded into the FamPat file. (Formerly, this coverage was split between the FamPat and INPAT files.)

Planned updates 2009

Major updates have been planned to QPAT's full text coverage in 2009. See the Coverage and Updates page on the Questel website for more information about the coming changes. The enhancements to non-patent data coverage and search functionality described below were communicated to Intellogist directly (e-mail from vendor, June 09, 2009), so further information is not available on the web at this time.

These changes include a major data coverage upgrade, including patent and non-patent data sources. The patent data enhancement includes adding full text and English machine translation coverage for the following authorities (shown with their projected dates of availability):

• Argentina (AR) - autumn 2009
• Brazil (BR) - autumn 2009
• Chile (CL) - autumn 2009
• Denmark (DK) - autumn 2009
• Finland (FI) - autumn 2009
• India (IN) - autumn 2009 (Bibliographic data currently available)
• Mexico (MX) - autumn 2009
• Russia (RU) - Summer 2009
• Sweden (SE) - autumn 2009
• Korea (KR) human translations for bibliographic data - June 2009

The non-patent data coverage enhancements will include adding the following major sources to the system:

• Inspec
• Pascal
• IP.com

In addition, planned functionality enhancements to the system include:

• A new keyword analysis feature - autumn 2009
• Search histories will no longer will be erased when switching files - by the end of 2009

July 2009

In July 2009, the Patolis corp, the producer of Japanese patent data and the ource of Japanese legal status data for Questel, announced that it was filing for bankruptcy.^[10] Despite this, Questel announced that it would continue to provide uninterrupted access to Patolis data, as the data services would continue. ^[11]

The following update has occurred since our last review. During our next scheduled update, this article will be revised to include a description of the newly added content and features.

In July, Questel made the following enhancements to its Asian data collections:

• The beta collection of Chinese (CN) full text machine-aided translations was extended back to 1985
• The Japanese (JP) full text machine-aided translation collection was extended back to 2004
• English hand translated bibliographic data for Korean (KR) documents was extended back to 1978, with hand translated assignee names back to February 1978.
• A collection of enhanced machine-translations of Taiwan (TW) bibliographic data was added back to 1993

For more information, see http://www.questel.fr/emailing/emailing_200907_Focus_on_Asia.htm.

June 2009

This update has occurred since our last review. During our next scheduled update, this article will be revised to include a description of the newly added content and features. In the meantime, an official summary of the new features may be found at http://www.questel.com/emailing/ecommunique_summer2009.htm.

In June of 2009, new data collections were added to QPAT, including:

• A beta collection of machine-aided translations of full text Chinese (CN) documents, including CN published applications, granted patents, and utility models
• Machine-aided translation collection of full text Japan (JP) documents now extends back to 2006
• A beta collection of machine translated English-language Indian bibliographic information from 2005 is now available (pre-2005 data is available in the FamPat bibliographic database)
• From May 2005 forward, the Japanese (JP) and Republic of Korea (KR) collections are supplemented with hand-translated assignee information

The press release for this update also indicates that a collection of human translations for Korean bibliographic information will be loaded by the end of June 2009.

In addition, new features were added to the Questel Analysis module during the system update:

• More statistical analysis functions can be performed on US classification data in the Analysis module, including:

- Top US Classes

- Dynamic Tag Clouds

- Evolution along a timeline

- Appearance by first date of publication

- Acceleration of US Classes in a specified timeframe

- Correlation (or "Data Crossing") of US Classes and assignee data

• The Analysis module now features a graph ranking the patent families in the analyzed data set by number of times cited. (This option, called "Citations," is found under the "Documents" menu in the Analysis module.)
• A chronological distribution graph by priority date is now available. (This option is in addition to the distribution graph by publication date, which was available previously.)
• Help documentation is now included in the Analysis module.

To learn more about the Questel Analysis module, see Analyzing Results.

February 2009

In February 2009, Questel announced the release of QPAT version 6.8. This new version includes the following features:

• Full text alerts are now available in PatentExaminer Workfiles.
  
• A new on-the-fly machine translation tool powered by Google Translate (to learn more about this feature, see Machine Translations).
  
• The ability to export from the FamPat file with one document number/patent per row (to learn more about this feature, see Export Functions).
  
• A redesigned hit list which presents the document title first (similar to the Google Patent Search engine), followed by assignee, document number, and publication date.
  
• Links from the FamPat patent family directly to the DigiPat prosecution (or file) history ordering service (see Prosecution Histories for more information).
  
• New Analysis module features (see Analyzing Results for more information).
  
• Enhanced document number import features which will recognize multiple number formats (see Import Functions for more information).

The official updates page can be found here.

November 2008

Version 6.7 of QPAT was released in November 2008. This release added additional functionality to the Alerting system. See Alerts for more information.

October 2008

Version 6.6b of QPAT, released in October 2008, introduced several coverage enhancements and new features to the system.

• A coverage enhancement was made to QPAT's legal status data and more detailed legal information is now available.
• Asian data is now updated faster, with Japanese documents available 2 weeks after publication, and Chinese and Korean documents available one week after publication. Additionally, Taiwanese documents are now available from 2003.
• Many European (EP), Japanese (JP), and US documents that have recently been scanned into the system have been processed via optical character recognition (OCR) technology and are now searchable; some documents (including JP records) have also been machine translated to make them searchable in English.
• New drawing mosaics are available for many US and JP records.

The new features are the addition of a link to the Questel Analysis Module on the hit list (before it was only available while in Patent Examiner), relevancy categories assigned by examiners from the EPO are now in the citation report, and the user can now order PDF documents from all records with a single click.

June 2008

By June 2008, a German language interface was added, along with links to the registers of AU, CN, KR, US and WO documents. A cited and citing patent analysis tool was added, along with a new dynamic citation graph. A new dynamic graph was added for extended Inpadoc families, as well as a 3D statistical analysis to be used with workfiles. Finally, the extended highlighting feature allows for adjacency between keywords, up-to-date coverage information is available in its own section, and an email connection feature was added.

Mid-Year 2008

Questel introduced a US full text backfile (USPATOLD) containing US patents from 1920 to 1973 scanned using Optical Character Recognition (OCR). This became available in QPAT in the middle of 2008.

March 2008

A number of new features were announced after this release, with implementation starting in March 2008, and all features available by June 2008 in Version 6.6. The first was the release of a US patent full text backfile from 1920-1973, as well as Austria (AT), Belgium (BE), and Switzerland (CH) full text collections. A collection of English full-text machine translations for Japanese documents were added shortly thereafter. The enhancements also included machine-translated titles and abstracts for DE and FR patents, beginning with documents published in 2007. Machine-translated abstract for CN, JP, and TW patents followed. This enhancement also included a promise of fast-tracking Japan, China and Korea's publications (with Taiwan added shortly thereafter), so that the system's bibliographic data will now be available in the FamPat database within 2-3 weeks of publication. Citation data was expanded to include patent and non-patent citation data from : Belgium (BE), Switzerland (CH),the Netherlands (NL), Turkey (TR), Australia (AU), and Japanese Grants (JP-B). ^[12] Finally, Questel offers comprehensive JP legal status data in continuation of the PATOLIS-e service, via Questel’s partnership with the Patolis Corp. However, this data is only available in QPAT via a separate subscription from Questel.

The March 2008 release also included the addition of a “natural language” and multi-lingual search platform which will translate keyword searches into English, German and French, via Questel’s partnership with Lingway. And finally, more analysis features were added to the Questel Analysis Module via a partnership with analysis company Intellixir.

January 2008

Version 6.2 of QPAT was released in January 2008, and contained enhancements to import and export features, and announcing the addition of a “Questel Analysis” module to Patent Examiner. The updates allow the system to recognize various patent number formats and to use an expanded range of export formats from QPAT workfiles in Patent Examiner, making them equal to the export options available for (unsaved) search results.

December 2007

Version 6.1 of QPAT was released in December of 2007, and added graphical display features for INPADOC families and citation relationships. This update also extended the session time limit to 24 hours before time-out.

Also in December of 2007, Questel announced its buyout by European investor SGCE (Société Générale Capital Europe), by which SGCE took the majority of shares in Questel, while employees of the company remained significant shareholders.

September 2007

Version 6.0 of QPAT was released in September of 2007. It incorporates further advances such as a new machine translation feature, improved keyword highlighting, and permanent saving, re-running and editing features for queries. Version 6 also introduced faster data exporting, and expanded the upper limit on number of exported records, to 2,500.

April 2007

Version 5.0 of QPAT, which was released in April of 2007, introduced a new UNIX architecture for the system, making searches up to “10 times faster,” according to Questel-Orbit representatives. This version also offers a session saving feature, independent claim searching, quicker access to drawing mosaics, and faster patent copy downloading.

Sources

1. ↑ "QPAT & PatentExaminer to be discontinued on January 1st, 2013." Questel website, http://www.questel.com/ecommunique/QPAT_end_reminder.html. Accessed January 8, 2013.
2. ↑ "QPAT & PatentExaminer to be discontinued on January 1st, 2013." Questel website, http://www.questel.com/ecommunique/QPAT_end_reminder.html. Accessed November 8, 2012.
3. ↑ ^{3.0 3.1} "Questel's Latest Developments." Questel website, http://www.questel.com/customersupport/userdoc/presentations/IPI_2012_QUESTEL_PLENARY_SESSION.pdf. Accessed May 22, 2012.
4. ↑ "QPAT & PatentExaminer to be discontinued on December 31st, 2012." Questel website, http://www.questel.com/ecommunique/QPAT_end.html. Accessed May 8, 2012.
5. ↑ "QPAT & PatentExaminer to be discontinued on December 31st, 2012." Questel website, http://www.questel.com/ecommunique/QPAT_end.html. Accessed April 02, 2012.
6. ↑ "Questel acquires Research Disclosure and becomes a major player in Defensive Publication." Questel website, http://www.questel.com/ecommunique/Defensive_publication.htm. Accessed March 23, 2012.
7. ↑ ^{7.0 7.1} E-mail correspondence from Questel representative, March 19, 2010.
8. ↑ "What's New!" QPAT website, http://www.qpat.com/index.htm. Accessed March 23, 2012.
9. ↑ "Updates on our Services, Interfaces, Databases, and Company." Questel website, http://www.questel.orbit.com/News/press_room_2009.htm/ Accessed March 23, 2012.
10. ↑ Engel, Alan. "PATOLIS files under bankruptcy law." Post to PIUG wiki. http://wiki.piug.org/display/PIUG/PATOLIS+files+under+bankruptcy+law. Accessed on July 22, 2009.
11. ↑ Garat, Renaud. "PATOLIS-E ACCESS." Post to PIUG wiki. http://wiki.piug.org/display/PIUG/2009/07/24/PATOLIS-E+ACCESS. Accessed July 24, 2009.
12. ↑ "The Coverage and Information page, QPAT." QPAT website http://www.qpat.com/main.jsp. Accessed on Sept 02, 2008.