We are pleased to announce the new Lens Patents 2.0 architecture is now available in a Preview environment!

Lens Patents 2.0 Preview

Following the release of the patent API in December, integration of the new Lens Patent MetaRecord (PMR) architecture into the Lens.org user interface (UI) has been progressing and we are pleased to announce this is now available to all users to explore the new fields and functionality in a preview environment before it enters full production in release 8.0.

The new architecture has been designed and constructed from the ground up to implement the Lens MetaRecord concept and accommodate additional patent data sources and valuable patent metadata. Moreover, our legacy custom Lucene search index has been replaced with an Elasticsearch index and MongoDB stack, bringing the technology inline with the scholarly MetaRecord architecture and enabling a range of new functionality previously unavailable in patents, including upgraded powerful patent analytics.

We invite all users to try the new Lens Patents 2.0 in the Preview environment, especially those who use Lens for patent information. Take a sneak peak at the new metadata and functionality, with three times as many fields (120+) and powerful analytics. This is your chance to try it and provide feedback before it goes into full production in release 8.0. Please send us your feedback and help make the Lens better for all!

Important Notice: While you are using the new Lens Patents 2.0 in the preview environment (Release 8.0 Beta version), your saved work area items will NOT be migrated across to the production version of Lens after testing finishes.

Lens Patents 2.0 Features

Improved Patent Data Coverage

Aligned with the Patent API data (Release 7.2), the upgraded UI features 120+ fields, three times more than what is currently available in production. These include abstracts, claims, and Legal Status, along with the names, countries and addresses of parties (inventors, applicants, agents/attorneys, owners) simple and extended family information, cited non-patent literature, and forward / backward patent citations. With the addition of INPADOC legal events data and improvements to the calculations for US assignments, the coverage of owner/assignee information has also increased by more than 50%.

* Number of patent MetaRecords records with data available for the listed fields.

Throughout 2021, we will enrich the UI with additional searchable fields to give you access to the most comprehensive patent metadata available.

New Searchable Fields

Of the 120+ new fields in the new patent information architecture, over 80 are new fields that are available for searching and filtering. Fields are listed on the Structured Search page under "Fields", and a list of the new fields mapped to their old field names is available here

Please Note: Fields in legacy queries have been mapped to the equivalent new fields and should give similar results to the production site. Please let us know if you see any significant discrepancies in results so we can investigate.

New Patent Metadata

Legal Status and Legal Events

The Lens has now ingested the EPO worldwide legal event data (INPADOC) data and incorporated it into the patent MetaRecords architecture, allowing for the calculation and display of the Legal Status of a patent and replacing the Open Patent Services (OPS) legal events on the Legal Info tab of individual patents.

The legal status is displayed on the search results list and on individual patents, and is included in the sidebar filter and analysis chart facets. Clicking on a patents’ legal status will open a pop-up modal which provides a summary of the information used in the Legal Status calculation. The legal status values include:

• Active: Granted patent is in force
• Pending: Application is pending
• Discontinued: Application discontinued, withdrawn or rejected, i.e. discontinuation before grant
• Inactive: Granted patent not in force because of lapse, non-fee payment, etc. The patent hasn't reached the term date and can be revived
• Expired: Patent has reached the term date and is no longer in force
• Patented: PCT applications that have been granted in one or more designated states, or non-PCT granted patents without enough information to calculate the term date
• Unknown: Not enough information to calculate status

Legal status values use a traffic-light style colour coding to indicate the accessibility of the IP rights contained in the patent. For example, green is used to indicate expired and discontinued patents that are no longer in force, while red is used to indicate active patents that are still in force. This enables a number of new use cases and allows you to do:

• Freedom to operate and prior art searches by searching for issued or pending patents (i.e. active IP rights).
• Search for granted patents by owner, year, jurisdiction, etc. (e.g. search for IBM patents which have been filed from 2001-2010 and have been granted subsequently).
• Find patents that are still in force using the calculated patent status.
• Identify early expiry due to non-payment of fees (i.e.abandoned patents).

Legal Info tab

Please Note: EPO worldwide legal event data (INPADOC) is provided as-is for information only. Legal Status is calculated from available data sources including INPADOC legal events, and may not be accurate. Please see the Patent Legal Status Calculations support post for more information on INPADOC legal events and how we calculate Legal Status.

Party Location

Several improvements have been made to the party metadata associated with Inventors, Applicants Owners, and now Agents and Attorneys, including the extraction of location information, and country and address information is now available for parties. This information is displayed on the summary tab of individual patents, with the country flag next to the party name and the address displayed below, and can be searched through dedicated fields available on the structured search page

Ownership Reconciliation

Owners are now calculated from both US Assignments and INPADOC legal events, expanding the coverage of owner information to over 50% more patent documents and adding owners from INPADOC legal events for non-US jurisdictions. The coverage of owners calculated from US Assignments has also been extended by improving the conveyance types covered. In a future release we will be adding the partial assignments to further improve the coverage of ownership information. Owners are now displayed on the summary tab in order of earliest recorded date so the latest owner is always shown first.

Agent and Attorney Details

Agent and Attorney information has been extracted from the front page of full text patent documents and is now available for search and filtering, including the name, address and country of the agent / attorney. The agent/attorney information is also displayed on the summary tab of individual patents.

Coming soon: Examiners and Party events!

Patent Families

In addition to the simple patent families, the extended patent family members based on the INPADOC extended patent family are now provided, along with the ability to group/expand a search by simple or extended family. The Family Info tab has also been updated with a redesigned family timeline and family priorities tables, and buttons to toggle between simple and extended family. Other family features include the option to sort by simple or extended family id, effectively allowing you to group all family members in the results list together.

Family Info tab

Classifications

Classification information has also been improved in the new PMR, with details such as the primary invention codes, additional codes, generating office and the classification schema version all now displayed on the summary tabs of individual patents.

The classification code descriptions have also been added to tooltips on the classification codes in the summary tabs of individual patents. The ability to display the classification descriptions has also been added as an additional chart setting option in heat maps. The CPC and IPC classification schemas in the classification explorer have also been updated to the latest versions (CPC Version 2021.02, IPC Version 2021.01)

Updated Patent Search and Analysis

Search Results

• Improved metadata display of the Bibliographic section in the results list and on individual patent pages
  • Added original application number to patent records
  • Added simple and extended family counts and ability to sort or group by both
  • Added Family jurisdictions
  • Added Legal Status
  • Updated the table view on the results list with customized display option
  • Added new pills including Legal status, Full text, Owners, Abstract, Claim, Description Sequences, Collections, Cited Works and Notes
• Analysis preview sidebar: The analysis preview sidebar will remain shown/hidden if the user has changed it until the user submits a new search from homepage or structured search which will reset it to shown.
• Added a series of summary stats based on the patent search string in the metrics carousel banner on top of the patent search results page. Stats include:
  • Patent Records: The number of patents document records in the result set
  • Simple Families: The number of simple patent families represented in the result set
  • Extended Families: The number of extended patent families represented in the result set
  • Cites Patents: Number of patent documents that cite other patents
  • Cited By Patents: The number of patent documents in the result set that are cited by other patent documents.
  • Patent Citations: Sum of cited by patent count for all cited documents in the result set
  • Cites NPL: Sum of cited by patent count for all cited documents in the result set
  • NPL Citations: The sum of cited NPL count for all patent documents in the result set that cite non-patent literature
  • Resolved NPL Citations: The sum of cites resolved scholarly works count for all patent documents in the result set that cite non-patent literature that have been resolved to a scholarly work Lens Id
• Improved Patent Results breadcrumbs, extended patent family counts are now displayed if the group/expand by extended family filters have been applied
• Improved the display of metadata in the patent table view

Improved Filters and Facets

Added additional boolean Flag fields to support advanced filtering options, including:

• Added Legal Status filter
• Added Agents & Attorneys filter

Analysis Charts and Dashboards

Now that ElasticSearch powers the Patent search, we have full access to all of its powerful aggregations and metrics. This is a drastic leap forward from what has previously been available for Patents in the Lens (previously being restricted to Scholar only).

Along with numerous small quality of life improvements making it easier than ever to produce professional dashboards.

• Redesigned chart settings panel
• The metric and aggregation settings are now combined into a single dropdown
• Numerous improvements to display of date histograms
• Added classification labels to heatmap charts
• New preset charts and dashboards
• Support for legacy patent dashboards

Other Improvements

• Improved citation data including resolved and unresolved non-patent literature cited, cited patents (backward patent citations)and citing patents (forward patent citations).
• Patent offices’ full text records are now incorporated into the patent MetaRecords without requiring a matching DOCDB record if none exists, increasing the coverage and timeliness of new patent filings.
• Redesigned homepage including a slide-out sidebar filter
• Added text match highlighting: highlighting in title plus text snippet shown in order: Claims, Abstract, Description
• Updated Sequences tab design
• Improved document preview for patents including updated navigation options on the patent image viewer, you can now navigate to the first/last page or a specific page number. Also added a gallery view to the sidebar for quickly browsing all document pages.
• Improved the formatting and display of patent full text
• A new Support Sidebar is available in beta in the Preview environment, including all new support content posts which can be searched from within the sidebar. Support post results have a modal that will include the support post video if one is available.
• Multi-lingual searching has been improved and results now display metadata in the selected query language where available.

Known Issues

There are a handful of known issues in the preview environment that will be fixed in a coming patch. These include:

• Legacy Query Mapping: Saved queries which use the full_text and sequence_length fields currently return no results
• Please Note: Fields in legacy queries have been mapped to the equivalent new fields and should give similar results to the production site. Please let us know if you see any significant discrepancies in results so we can investigate.
• There are no species names in the Biological filters, only the sequence.tax_id are displayed currently.
• PatCite functionality is not available in the preview environment.

Important Notice: While you are using the new Lens Patents 2.0 in the preview environment (Release 8.0 Beta version), your saved work area items will NOT be migrated across to the production version of Lens after testing finishes.

Interested in helping us improve?

• We invite all users to try the new Lens Patents 2.0 in the Preview environment, especially those who use Lens for patent information. Take a sneak peak at the new metadata and functionality, with three times as many fields (120+) and powerful analytics. This is your chance to try it and provide feedback before it goes into full production in release 8.0. Please send us your feedback and help make the Lens better for all!

The Lens is a public good project run by Cambia, a global social enterprise that is committed to making the innovation process more transparent, inclusive and effective for those seeking to solve problems and make a social impact and thus, we welcome your active engagement, participation, and support.

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