Inventor Mobility Index

Thorsten DoherrZentrum für Europäische Wirtschaftsforschung

Center of Economic Research, MannheimGermany

Two inventors with the same name are not neccessarily the same person Defining an inventor only by its name results in too much false mobility

especially for inventors with common names Restricting the definition too much (i.e.: name and home address) will

cancel any mobility

You have to decide wether two patents from inventors with the same name are actually from the same person or from different persons that share the same name

Mission:

The complete patent data

Problem:

Tools:

Mission

if they are inventing for the same applicantif they have the same home addressif they are working with the same co-inventorsif one is citing the otherif they have patents in the same area of technology (ipc)

Two inventors with the same name are the same person…

Plausibility Rules

Inventor:A single inventor entry in a patent document

Person:All inventors with a specific name that are linked by at least one plausibility

rule

Harmonization of Applicants

The SearchEngine is an in-house developed software package specialized in company address matching. It implements the following steps: Normalizing of the search fields (company name, address fields) by

transforming them to uppercase, replacing special letters to their common (phonetic) representation (i.e.: Ü UE, ß SS), compressing abbreviations (i.e.: S.P.A. SPA) and replacing special characters with blanks

Creating a dictionary containing all the words of the search fields along with their occurrence. To preserve the context, every search field has its own chapter. The occurence is the base for the heuristic search algorithm. There are also supporting tables that link the dictionary entries back to the company table.

The search algorithm separates a search term into words. Each word is associated with the occurrence counter of the appropriate dictionary entry. The occurrence reflects the identification potential of the word. A low occurrence has a high identity, because the resulting list of potential hits is small.

SearchEngine

ENTRY OCCURS IDENTITY

… … …

CORPORATION 16 1/16 = 0.062500

… … …

ITALIA 491 1/491 = 0.002037

… … …

LEAR 4 1/4 = 0.250000

… … …

SPA 6119 1/6119 = 0.000163

DICTIONARY - Chapter: APPLICANT_NAME

Lear Corporation ITALIA S.p.A.

LEAR CORPORATION ITALIA SPA SUM0.250000 0.062500 0.002037 0.000163 .3147000

79.441% 19.860% 0.647% 0.052% 100%

NAME IDENTITY

LEAR CORPORATION ITALIA S.p.A. 100.000%

Lear Corporation Italia S.r.l. 99.947%

LEAR ITALIA SEATING S.p.A. 80.139%

Searching for…

Result

Example of the SearchEngine Algorithm

Harmonization of Applicants

Harmonization of Applicants

The resulting list of matching pairs is not symmetric: A can be linked to B but it is not required that B is linked to A linked pairs create a network

Network Analysis: if A is linked to B and B is linked to C, the analysis identifies the group A,B,C

Re-iteration of the network analysis for too large groups with an increased cutoff limit for their members.

Finalization A cutoff limit for the identity is applied to filter all results (i.e. 90%)

Creating phonetic representations of the name using the Metaphone algorithm by Lawrence Philips, 1990

Phonetic algorithms create unique representations for similar sounding words (names) and can be indexed direct database access

Originally the results they delivered were manually validated because of their strong tendency for false positives automated matching requires an automated validation process

Harmonization of Inventor Names

Automated comparison of the retrieved names with the searched name The function is based on the least relative character position deltas and

requires two words as parameters can not be used for index based direct access

Needs phonetic indexing to quickly generate a list of potential candidates Tolerance for typing errors increases with the length of the words longer

words are more prone to typing errors

The SearchEngine is of limited use because… it is most efficient with search terms consisting of multiple words the main problem are typing errors and misspellings

Harmonization of Inventor Names

MR BRTNMAURO BARATONI

MARIO BERRETTONI

MARIO BERTINI

MARIO BERTON

MAURO BERTONI

MAURO BORDIN

FIRST NAME LAST NAME

Example for the Metaphone Search

Harmonization of Inventor Names

0 0.1 0.2 0.3 0.4 0.5 0.6 0.7 0.8 1.0C Z A R N I T Z K I

C H A R N I Z K I0 0.125 0.25 0.375 0.5 0.625 0.75 0.875 1.0

0 0.63 0.02 0.041 0.05 0.069 1.0 0.02 0.013 0∆ + + + + + + + + += = 1.875

= 1-

Example for the Least Relative Character Position Deltas

if they are inventing for the same applicant.if they have the same home address.if they are working with the same co-inventors.if one citing the other.if they have patents in the same area of technology (ipc).

Two inventors with the same name are the same person…

Plausibility Rules

Inventor:A single inventor entry in a patent document.

Person:All inventors with a specific name that are linked by at least one plausibility

rule.

All Patents of an Inventor Name

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The Same Applicant Rule

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The Same Home Address Rule

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The Co-Inventor Rule

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The Citation Rule

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The IPC Rule

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Italian Inventor Mobility Indexpatents from Italian applicants and inventors

different harmonized inventor names

nodes after applying the same applicant rule

nodes after applying the co-inventor rule

nodes after applying the citation rule

123356

49101

60268

nodes after applying the same home address rule53316

53572

52504

50276 nodes after applying the ipc rule

Espace Bulletin (March 2010), EPO

Patstat (September 2010), OECD

Main Database:

Citations:

Development: Microsoft Visual FoxPro 9.0

FROM TO

… …

1 2

1 5

2 1

2 5

2 7

5 1

5 2

6 7

7 2

7 6

… …

Traversal of a Network Table

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GROUP MEMBER

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1 2

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1 6