SUPRAPAT: A value added patent database -- A personal view and vision

Abstract

A short look back to the beginnings of patent documentation in industry shows that the austerity of data available in the old patent databases of the 1960s and 1970s (because of insufficient memory and disk space) still has effects on the multitude of present databases. Millions of patent records added each year may lead to frustration of many users when confronted with rising costs and search times. The resulting non-use of some bases is dangerous for patent departments and leads to diminishing revenues for database producers. This gives rise to the proposal of one and only one comprehensive logical (not necessarily physical) patent database containing extended data. Many of them are available in one or the other of the existing databases, but not all together in one file. EPO, Derwent and CA are regarded as centers of competence for bibliographic data collecting and correcting; abstracting; indexing and deep analysis, respectively.