PatentCafe Creates Search for IBM OSS Patent Collection

Patent search engine PatentCafe has announced a new Open Source Software Patent Search Engine, which will be devoted to patents that have been released to open source and made available to software developers. The patent search engine has been initially populated with the 500 patents that IBM has released to open source. It's available at http://www.iamcafe.com/index.asp?option=OSS_Info .

You can log in as an anonymous user, or as a registered user, with the main difference seeming to be that the anonymous user doesn't have a persistent account. I logged in as an anonymous user.

The site cautions you to paste in or type in an entire paragraph describing what you're looking for, not to just enter a few words. So I took them at their word and searched for the following:

Metadata - data about data - allows systems to collocate related information, and helps users find relevant information. The creation of metadata has generally been approached in two ways: professional creation and author creation. In libraries and other organizations, creating metadata, primarily in the form of catalog records, has traditionally been the domain of dedicated professionals working with complex, detailed rule sets and vocabularies.

(the paragraph above is from Adam Mathes' December 2004 paper "Folksonomies - Cooperative Classification and Communication Through Shared Metadata". You may read it at www.adammathes.com/academic/computer-mediated-communication/folksonomies.html .)

The result count isn't useful -- I got back 500 results. (Out of the 500 IBM patents actually IN the search engine.) Pay more attention to the relevancy percentage on the left side of each search result. This search had five results in the 90%s, with the first one being Attribute-based classification and retrieval system .

The search results provide the number of the patent, the name of the patent, and the terms that matched your search, allowing for tweaking. Click on the number of the patent or the name of the patent and you'll get the abstract for that patent, claims relating to that patent, and a list of patents that this patent cites, and a list of patents which cite the patent you're looking at.

There are also some tool links to the right of the listing. You can get a full bibliography of the patent, a link to full text (but I never was able to get full-text for the patents I looked at), a link to an ad to buy the PDFs for all 500 patents for $125, and a link to an ad to buy a report on the predicted value of a patent (which made my javascript console wig out.)

There is a limited amount of full-text information you'll get with this search engine, but using this contextual search in conjunction with other searches brings up possibilities. I used Google to search for the patent number of the first patent I looked at (patent #5,201,047). The first result of a Google search for that number was a link to FreePatentsOnline for that patent ( http://www.freepatentsonline.com/5201047.html ) as well as a listing of other patent pages which include that patent number. The FreePatentsOnline site includes patent images and a full description and claim listing.

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