Current Challenges in Patent Information Retrieval (The Information Retrieval Series)

Patents form an important knowledge resource –much technical information represented in patents is not represented in scientific literature – and at the same time they are important, and economically highly relevant, legal documents. Between 1998 and 2008, the number of patent applications filed yearly worldwide grew by more than 50 percent. Yet still we see a huge gap between, on the one hand, the technologies that emerged from research labs and are in use in major Internet search engines or in enterprise search systems, and, on the other hand, the systems used daily by the patent search communities.

In the past few years, the editors have organized a series of events at the Information Retrieval Facility in Vienna, Austria, bringing together leading researchers in information retrieval (IR) and those who practice and use patent search, thus establishing an interdisciplinary dialogue between the IR and the intellectual property (IP) communities and creating a discursive as well as empirical space for sustainable discussion and innovation. This book is among the results of that joint effort. Many of the chapters were written jointly by IP and IR experts, while all chapters were reviewed by representatives of both communities, resulting in contributions that foster the proliferation and exchange of knowledge across fields and disciplinary mindsets.

Reflecting the efforts and views of both sides of the emerging patent search research and innovation community, this is a carefully selected, organized introduction to what has been achieved, and perhaps even more significantly to what remains to be achieved. The book is a valuable resource for IR researchers and IP professionals who are looking for a comprehensive overview of the state of the art in this domain.

Mihai Lupu obtained his PhD degree in 2008 under the Singapore―MIT Alliance at the National University of Singapore, where he researched data retrieval in peer-to-peer networks. He is continuing his research in the area of information retrieval, with an emphasis on patent retrieval, cross-lingual retrieval and chemical structure retrieval evaluation. At the IRF, he organizes the Chemical IR Evaluation campaign and the Patent Information Retrieval workshop series, and leads the institute's involvement in several research projects.

Katja Mayer (PhD, University of Vienna) specialized in social studies of science and worked as a consultant, researcher and university lecturer before joining the Information Retrieval Facility (IRF). She is interested in the historical and social implications of information retrieval applications and focuses on the public impact of search technologies.

John Tait (PhD, University of Cambridge, 1983) first followed a career in industry, mainly working on problems of large-scale information retrieval and management, before taking up a post at the University of Sunderland in 1991, where he eventually became Professor of Intelligent Information Systems and Associate Dean ofComputing and Technology, leading the University of Sunderland Information Retrieval Group. In September 2007 he took up the post of Chief Scientific Officer of the IRF. John is a past Program Committee chair of the ACM SIGIR conference (2005), past General Chair of the EuropeanConference on Information Retrieval (2004), an Associate Editor of ACM Transactions on Information Systems,and joint Editor of Natural Language Engineering, and he has published over 100 refereed conference and journal papers.His current research focuses on patent retrieval and multi-lingual search.

Anthony Trippe is Director of Intellectual Property Analytics with 3LP Advisors, which he joined in 2008. Previous to that he was Senior Innovation Manager at CAS where he was responsible for creating new product ideas around the areas of chemical, life sciences and patent information. He has a long history of working in the patent information field and has been a sought-after speaker for many years on the topic of patent analysis and visualization. In addition, Anthony is currently the PIUG (Patent Information Users Group, Inc.) Chair (2010―2012) and the Chair of the Patent Analysis Working Group.