IPAustralia enhances its online searching system with full text search capabilities
AusPat is IPAustralia's online searching system for patent information, and was developed to provide an integrated solution for Australian patent searching.
Since releasing AusPat in April 2008, IPAustralia has continued to expand and improve upon the initial offering. As well as some minor improvements to make the system more user-friendly there have been a number of major additions to the type of information available and to tools for using it.
The e-Register allows for an extract of the Register of Patents to be obtained online rather than having to physically order it. The e-Register covers standard and innovation patents sealed after 24 May 2001. In addition to the usual bibliographic data it contains the current status of the patent and a calculated expiry date based on a 20-year term.
The e-Journal allows for specific searching of the Australian Official Journal of Patents for publication actions in combination with other search fields including applicant, title and number. It is possible to search over a range of dates or journal volume/issue numbers. This is a step up from having to download and manually search every journal individually. At present there are 16 different publication actions to select including accepted applications, extensions of time and opposition proceedings.
IPAustralia have upgraded the tools available for manipulating the information located during a search. A new function called MySearches allows for a number of searches to be saved for later use. This has particular utility where a search needs to be replicated at a later or recurring date such as in patent watches.
The MyList functionality has been changed to become more flexible. In addition to increasing the number of documents that can be stored in MyList it is also possible to download a pdf or csv file of the bibliographic detail of the stored documents. These files now contain all of the available display fields of an AusPat search either in a record format (pdf) or as a spreadsheet (csv) whereas previously it was only possible to obtain the default display fields.
As useful as these improvements have been they still only skim the surface of the pool of data contained within Australian patent specifications in that AusPat searches bibliographic data, i.e. data that can be found on the front page of the specification. It is with that limitation in mind that IPAustralia have now unlocked the door to the rest of the specification and introduced full text searching to AusPat.
Full text searching in AusPat will eventually cover all Australian specifications open to public inspection (OPI) dating back to 1904. The first release includes about half of the full collection, and the rest will be released progressively over the next few months.
A number of new fields have been added to AusPat to enable specific searching of portions of the specification. It is now possible to search the abstract, description or claims separately or you can search the whole specification. As well as enhancing the reliability of search results by being able to dig deeper and avoid, or at least minimise, the old problems of obscure titles and misclassification, it is possible to narrow the focus of your search should you initially obtain a large number of hits.
One significant feature not previously available in AusPat is proximity searching. In addition to the usual Boolean operators AND and OR it will be possible to locate specifications where a first keyword is within x words of a second keyword, in either direction. Relevancy of the search results will improve using these operators, and as the number of hits is likely to be less it will be possible to search further keywords thus also improving the comprehensiveness of the search.
While the searching interface has remained the same, the results page now has the option of accessing the specifications directly, rather than having to drill down into each record to access the specification link.
IPAustralia's progress towards a one-stop shop for Australian patent information is still not complete. They are already working on e-Dossier, a file wrapper module allowing access to documents relating to prosecution and examination of patent applications since 2006, which should be released in 2011.
AusPat may be accessed at http://www.ipaustralia.gov.au/auspat/.
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