Every year, I look forward to attending the Patent Information Users Group annual conference.  Better known as “PIUG” to its members, this organization serves as a community for highly specialized patent searchers, database developers, and search technology innovators.  I always learn a great deal and meet very interesting people working in the patent industry.  But this year’s conference is very special: it’s PIUG’s 20^th anniversary!  In the 20 years of its existence, the PIUG has grown from a modest 16 original members to over 634 active members from 30 countries.  Nearly 400 attendees are here in Washington D.C. for the celebration.      

The conference takes place Saturday, May 17^th through Thursday, May 22^nd . The theme is “20 Years of Patent Searching in a World of Emerging Technologies”.  A record number of workshops cover current issues in patent technologies. Exhibitors from around the provide demonstrations of new products and new developments in existing products.  LexisNexis is a major exhibitor and sponsor this year.  Saturday, LN’s own Richard Garner, Intellectual Property Product Director, gave a presentation titled “TotalPatent and PatentOptimizer – Integrated IP Solutions from LexisNexis”.  Monday, Harriet Meehan, Global Solutions Development Product Manager, gave an overview of TotalPatent.  She noted its coverage of 96 patent authorities – more than any other online database – as well as its search and analytics capabilities.

 Other highlights from Monday’s presentations were:   

• Bernard Gress, an economist at Fannie Mae, demonstrated that the exchange of patent citations between technology groups evolves over time and reveals technological trends.

•  Anu Vaidyanathan, the CEO of the company PatNMarks, the first Indian company to provide comprehensive IP information for , explained that Indian patent information available through INPADOC and free online services is deficient.  This information is based on bibliographic information only, suffers from missing data, and does not provide complete coverage of all patent types.  Her company creates proprietary, in-house databases which have been manually corrected and verified.  She provided an overview of Indian patent literature and described the challenges PatNMarks faces in maintaining its high quality databases.

•  Dong Zhao, the Vice President of Beijing East Linden Science & Technology Co., Ltd., gave a very exciting talk on semantic search in Chinese patents.  East Linden developed a search engine called “Patentics”.  It searches on the basis of concepts that are represented by mathematical vectors.  Patents are indexed and grouped on the basis of their meaning in both English and Chinese.  By using the conceptual model of searching, patents may be searched using English or Chinese keywords.