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One of the most powerful features of the Delphion website is the Delphion Integrated View, our industry-exclusive interface that allows you to view not only original patent data, but also all the related information that gives you greater insight into a patent.
To learn more about the capabilities of the Integrated View and upcoming plans to enhance the tool even further, we present below an interview with two Delphion executives responsible for its development and management — Cindy Poulos, director of product management, and Eric van Stegeren, senior director of product development.
Cindy: The Integrated View saves time for customers, because it presents all information relevant to a particular patent in one easy to follow document. It includes extensive links to enable single click access to things like other family members, forward and backward citations, non-patent prior art, business profile data, and even information about licensing the innovation.
Eric: Our goal with the Integrated View has always been to streamline access to information for our customers. With other patent research databases, users have to conduct two or three searches just to get the same information that our Integrated View presents with one search.
To make this happen, we do a number of things behind the scenes with the raw data we receive from patent-issuing authorities. For example, we normalize IPC (International Patent Classification) codes from all our worldwide collections. This enables our customers to conduct one search across multiple patent collections on the Delphion website. We also normalize the data. For example, there are probably 32 different ways the name IBM appears in patent documents. Because we normalize the data, our customers are ensured their search results will have every reference to that company — no matter how they enter in its name.
Another key capability of the Integrated View is the hyperlinking. From the Integrated View, a user can quickly and easily link to an original patent document, as well as a patent's legal-status and family information, prior art references and much more. It's all to optimize efficiency for our customers.
Eric: We've designed the Delphion website to offer the industry's most complete patent record. This record essentially has three main parts — our base patent collections, including those from the U.S., Europe, Japan and World Intellectual Property Organization; legal-status and global patent-family information from INPADOC; and prior art references from sources like the Institute for Scientific Information. From one view, a customer can scan all this information and more.
Cindy: It also includes a hyperlink to the Hoovers business information about the assignee, and the ability to immediately view, download or print a high resolution version of the patent document. And, from other links on the Integrated View you can generate new result sets for things like other patents owned by the same assignee, other patents in the same IPC or US classification, and later patents that reference this one.
Eric: In 1996, I joined the team that is now responsible for Delphion Research. So I've been a part of the solution almost since its birth. Since that time, we've been continuously enhancing it. We expanded the number of patent collections available on the website, and added powerful features like data normalization, forward-referencing and hyperlinking. We've always seen ourselves as the innovators in our market, always pushing the envelope in terms of the capabilities offered for patent research.
One of our mantras, too, is to ensure that the patent information on the Delphion website is accessible to both professional and novice searchers. We know that many of our customers are business professionals who don't necessarily have advanced information-searching skills. Unlike other patent research databases, Delphion is designed for all searchers at all different skill levels.
Cindy: Depending on their role and the purpose of their research, users can leverage the Integrated View in a number of ways — including using the data for competitive research, build versus buy decisions, performing due diligence in mergers and acquisitions, or for litigation support, for example. The Integrated View can serve the needs of people throughout an organization, including research and development, finance, legal, competitive intelligence, marketing and human resources.
Eric: Our users will all have their own ways of using the Integrated View, depending on what they want to get out of their research. But I think one of the most significant features that benefits everyone is the hyperlinking. With it, all of the information is a mouse click away. I also think the classification codes are key, particularly for novice users. Because these codes are used by patent authorities to categorize patents, they enable users to easily identify all the patents within a certain grouping.
Another great feature is the ability to see all patents assigned to a particular individual or organization. This feature can be found in the assignee field, and appears as a hyperlink with the words "other patents from…" This feature helps users better understand the patent portfolios held by certain companies and people. Also, a huge time-saver is the image browser, which presents thumbnails of original patent documents. By viewing the thumbnails, of course, a user can more quickly identify the page or pages that provide the particular information they're looking for, including any illustrations that may accompany a patent.
Cindy: We are always looking at how our customers use patent data to discover new ways to present related information that would enhance their experience and add insight to their research. We try to anticipate the next step the user would take after viewing a specific piece of patent data, and then we work to find a way to accommodate that next activity on our site. Our goal is to provide a one-stop experience for intellectual property research, and we'll continue to add to the Integrated View in an effort to do just that.
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