Exploring the Opaqueness of the Patent System - Evidence from a Natural Experiment

One of the objectives of patent systems is to disclose information which other agents can build on in further inventions and in their decision-making. While some observers take it as given that real-world patent systems serve this objective, we argue in this article that patent systems are highly opaque and likely to be of limited value as a source of information. We use data from a natural experiment to explore this issue. Requests for accelerated examination used to be publicly observable at the European Patent Office (EPO). Starting in December 2001, the EPO started to treat these requests as confidential information. Using data on acceleration requests which were historically known only to the applicant and the EPO, and later provided to us, we test whether the change in the information regime impacted the actions of applicants and their rivals. We develop a theoretical model of acceleration requests and patent opposition to identify the extent to which the patent system is opaque. We confirm empirically that opposition and acceleration rates of high-value patents change significantly in most technological areas once acceleration requests become unobservable. We interpret these results as evidence that the system is highly opaque in many fields

Komposition, Choreograhpie und Orchestrierung von Web Services: Ein Überblick

Der Bedarf von Unternehmen nach einer system- und bereichsübergreifenden Anwendungsintegration ist hoch. Die mittlerweile verfügbaren Standards für Web Services (UDDI, WSDL, SOAP) bieten einen viel versprechenden Ansatz für den Aufbau integrierter, serviceorientierter Architekturen. Sie sind offen, einfach und plattformunabhängig. Allerdings stellt die prozessorientierte Verknüpfung heterogener Anwendungs bausteine eine komplexe Aufgabe dar, und es ist noch nicht wirklich absehbar, wie sich die Vielfalt der Empfehlungen, Standards und Werkzeuge entwickeln wird. Vision ist die automatische Auswahl und prozessorientierte Komposition von Web Services. Für die dazu notwendige semantische Beschreibung der Dienste gibt es jedoch noch keine allgemein akzeptierten Konventionen. Ebenso befinden sich andere Aspekte wie Sicherheit und Verlässlichkeit noch in der Entwicklung. Dieser Artikel gibt eine Einführung in Web Services und behandelt Aspek te der Komposition, Choreographie und Orchestrierung von Web Services. Zudem wird auf sich abzeichnende bzw. aufkommende Standards eingegangen

Exploring the Opaqueness of the Patent System - Evidence from a Natural Experiment

One of the objectives of patent systems is to disclose information which other agents can build on in further inventions and in their decision-making. While some observers take it as given that real-world patent systems serve this objective, we argue in this article that patent systems are highly opaque and likely to be of limited value as a source of information. We use data from a natural experiment to explore this issue. Requests for accelerated examination used to be publicly observable at the European Patent Office (EPO). Starting in December 2001, the EPO started to treat these requests as confidential information. Using data on acceleration requests which were historically known only to the applicant and the EPO, and later provided to us, we test whether the change in the information regime impacted the actions of applicants and their rivals. We develop a theoretical model of acceleration requests and patent opposition to identify the extent to which the patent system is opaque. We confirm empirically that opposition and acceleration rates of high-value patents change significantly in most technological areas once acceleration requests become unobservable. We interpret these results as evidence that the system is highly opaque in many fields

An Environment for the Orthographic Modeling of Workflow Components

Abstract: An important goal of workflow engines is to simplify the way in which the interaction of workflows and software components (or services) is described and implemented. The vision of the AristaFlow project is to support a "plug and play " approach in which workflow designers can describe interactions with components simply by "dragging " them from a repository and "dropping " them into appropriate points of a new workflow. However, to support such an approach in a practical and dependable way it is necessary to have semantically rich descriptions of components (or services) which can be used to perform automated compatibility checks and can be easily understood by human workflow designers. This, in turn, requires a modeling environment which supports multiple views on components and allows these to be easily generated and navigated around. In this paper we describe the Integrated Development Environment (IDE) developed in the AristaFlow project to support these requirements. After outlining the characteristics of the "plug and play " workflow development model, the paper describes the two main innovations within the IDE – the dynamic generation of mutually consistent views and the multi-dimensional navigation scheme.