What`s in a name?

The issue of using consistent naming conventions in patent applications is likely to be one of the hottest topics at IPI Confex, which will be held in Rome next month.
The three-day conference, now in its 11th year, is promoted as the premier event in Europe for patent information professionals, with a conference, exhibition, a wide array of workshops, and plenty of networking opportunities.
According to Stephen Adams, managing director of UK-based patent documentation consultancy Magister – who will be speaking at the event – the problem of names, whether of actual individuals or corporate bodies, is one of the most complex in dealing with patent information.
He said: ‘It strikes at the heart of understanding intellectual property as an asset which is owned, managed and traded. Individual patent records and compiled databases may record what purports to be the same information in different ways.
Since name information is often dynamic as well, the question of updating or amending database records is also important, both to retain historical trends and to understand the current legal situation on ownership. There are many challenges, and some solutions, to the questions of searching for patent assignment, during prosecution and after grant.’
Adams explained that the session will examine both bibliographic and legal status sources to understand how name data are recorded (assuming that they are indeed recorded), including questions of re-assignment in national registers, transliteration from non-Latin languages such as Chinese, Japanese and Cyrillic alphabets, and the ‘simpler’ problems of Latin language diacritics and how they have been handled over time.
Daniel Shalloe, from the European Patent Office, agreed that the subject of accurate naming was a key issue in the world of patent information.
He told Research Information: ‘With all the mergers and acquisitions going on at the moment, with companies changing their names – and through simple slapdash behaviour – this has become a problem.
‘For example in one application an applicant might be Tom Jones, in another one Mr T Jones, and another one T Jones Ltd. How does one determine that these are the same applicants? Standardisation would obviously be beneficial, so applicants are effectively a number rather than a name – but we don’t have that in Europe yet. When you are doing patent analysis it is critical to get your understanding of the people you are dealing with right, otherwise you are going to miss a whole pile of data and end up with the wrong result.
‘There are occasionally ulterior motives too – of course I am not going to name anybody, but you can see that if you want to confuse people you can use a load of different names for your company and people will be confused about which patents you have and which ones you don’t have. There are also instances of the use of intermediary companies to effectively draw a veil over patent portfolios.’
Other issues covered in the conference programme, which runs from 8 to 11 March, include: visionary perspectives from industry experts; current news and other ‘hot topics’; latest developments concerning commercially available products and services; free patent databases and other resources available worldwide for intellectual property research; ‘how-to’ technical discussions; and continuing education and training through add-on workshops and seminar.