Community Patent Review - Project Documents

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Welcome to the Community Patent Review project technical document page, the repository of technical and design documents for the United States Patent and Trademark Office Community Patent Review pilot project. 

The following draft project documents are available for comment:

• Screen mockups - The latest visual design for the system. *** UPDATED Feb 21, 2006
• Use Cases - A functional specification for the system ** UPDATED Nov 2006
• Developer Wiki - Contains candidate architecture proposals for each use case.
• Rating and Reputation Mechanisms - Overview of rating and reputation aspects of system
• Workflow Process Overview - Describes how the system works
• Feature List - A list of the key features of the system
• Metrics - Proposed metrics for the system.
• Supplemental Requirements - Listing of non-functional system requirements such as system availability. UPDATED Nov 29
• Tasks, Issues, and Risks - Project planning information UPDATED Nov 29
• Site Map Example - Draft navigation flow for the system user interface
• Suggestion Box - A place for providing other suggestions.

To review the project documents and provide feedback, just click on one of the above links. At the bottom of each page are links that allow comments to be added. Feedback to the developer mailing list is also encouraged. We welcome constructive input that is focused on improving the system design.

This series of web pages has been designed to enable a public conversation about the pilot design and solicit feedback.  We are committed to complete transparency and will post all project documentation to encourage collaboration within and between the legal and technology communities.

The project team is planning to upgrade the technical infrastructure for the project in the future. The document listed here will eventually be migrated to another solution. However, we did not want to hold up the feedback process while we design that system. We plan to change to a new mechanism for document feedback in October 2006.

Thanks,

The Community Patent Review Project Team

About the Community Patent Review project
Community Patent Review (CPR) is a project of the Institute for Information Law and Policy at New York Law School working with the United States Patent and Trademark Office. It is an initiative under the Patent Office Five Year Strategic Plan (2007-2012).  CPR is sponsored by Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Microsoft and Red Hat and supported by a grant from the Omidyar Network.  For more information, please see http://dotank.nyls.edu/communitypatent.

Keywords: p2patent-developer, p2patent, use cases

Feature List

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This post includes a list of the proposed features for the website.  Please feel free to provide constructive suggestions about changes to the list of features or ideas for new features.

1. Impacts Decision-Making: Community Patent Review is directly tied into the Patent Office’s examination process.

2. Published not Granted Applications: The process attempts to winnow out bad patents before they are granted.

3. Easy Tracking: P2Patent web site enables members of expert communities of practice to receive notice of new patents and submissions of prior art and comments on those patents. Subscriptions will deliver information via email, RSS, and these can be accessed online or via mobile telephones. Subscriptions can be customized based on areas of interest.

4. Invite-An-Expert: Subscribers can invite others to subscribe, facilitating those in the know to identify other experts.
5. Searching: The system allows searching for relevant prior art examples and provides a federated search to external prior art databases.
6. Tagging: Community can tag applications with keywords to render them more searchable. 
7. Manageable Participation: Online participation will take place over a 4 month window of time to make participation both manageable and relevant to actual decision-making.
8. Education: Online tutorials (video, audio and text) explain how to participate effectively.
9. Claim Ranking Tools: Community ranks claims by relevance in order to guide itself to the claims for which prior art should be sought.
10. No Rule Changes Required: The P2Patent software is designed to make patent examination better informed and more effective.  Applicants will consent to participate; no statutory or regulatory amendments are required.
11. Anonymity/Accountability: P2Patent system enables open collaboration while using security protections to prevent abuses.  Maintaining an open peer review system lets anyone who knows and has prior art submit it.
12. Labeling and Annotation: Prior art submissions are clearly labeled, annotated and commented in order to explain their relevance to the patent and its claims.
13. Commentary: Patent applicants consent to receive comments on prior art submissions, avoiding the need to change current rules while making information in the system more useful.
14. Prior Art Library: All submitted prior art is published to the website to avoid duplication of submissions.  Peer reviewers can maintain personal prior art libraries.
15. Targeted Information: Peer reviewers rank the prior art for relevance so that examiner has a mangeable, targeted, ordered list.
16. Ranking: P2Patent provides rating and ranking tools to make participation manageable.  There are tools to ranks the claims of a patent application in order to focus community attention where it is most needed.  It provides a mechanism to rank submitted prior art in order to create manageable output for the patent examiner as well as participant rating to encourage useful contributions.
17. Objective Rating: Peer reviewers receive positive ratings when the patent examiner cites their prior art and commentary in his patent determination.
18. Automated Reports: Examiner receives rank-ordered list of prior art at the end of the community patent review.  This automated search report reflects the wisdom of the community.
19. Building a Knowledge and Learning Environment: Prior art submissions added to database.

Workflow Process Overview

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This post describes the basic system workflow.  Construcive comments on the proposed workflow are welcomed. If a comment applies to a particular step in the process, please indicate that in the comment. Thanks for your participation!

Process Description:

1. Patent applicant requests review of a specific patent application under the Community Patent Review process.
2. Patent application data is transferred from USPTO to the p2patent system. Application is published on the p2patent web site and available for comments for a 4 month time period.
3. Electronic notifications of the new application’s availability go out to the peer review community by means of electronic subscription.
4. Peer reviewers invite more experts to subscribe and participate.
5. Peer reviewers can search and find applications of interest
6. Peer reviewers can associate tags or keywords with applications or prior art, so that they are easier for the community to find in the future.
7. Visualization aids reveal web site activity and make the Community Patent peer review community visible to itself. Such aids might include visualizations of the number of applications and which applications have the most comments.
8. Once registered, peer reviewers can: 1) rate claims, 2) submit prior art examples, 3) comment on the patent or on specific prior art submissions, 4) rate prior art submissions, 5) rate prior art, 6) rate peer reviewers.
9. Prior art submissions are added to a community knowledge base and are available for use in future application reviews.
10. Peer reviewers can view and rate the comments and prior art examples created by others, or add follow up comments in a discussion thread.
11. Alerts are generated, notifying subscribers about new postings (e.g. prior art and/or comments) that are added to a specific application.
12. Results of prior art submissions are sent to the patent examiner and inventor at the close of the peer review period.
13. Examiner can use as few or as many prior art submissions as desired in making the patentability determination.
14. Members of the community receive “karma effects,” status points for submitting prior art that is deemed relevant by the community and used by examiners.

Technology Brainstorm

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This blog is focused on gathering feedback for project related technology questions. Each question will be posted separately so that we can gather feedback separately. Constructive feedback and ideas are welcome.

Thanks

Community Patent Review Project Team

Collaboration frameworks

Some of the technical frameworks under consideration for CPR include:
Fedora http://www.fedora.info/ (not the operating system)
Drupal - http://drupal.org/
Lenya - http://lenya.apache.org/

Are there any other open source CMS frameworks that should be considered?
Any comments on the advantages or disadvantages of these frameworks?

Visualization Tools

We are considering using treemaps and tag clouds for visualizing various kinds of activity on the community workspace.

What open source software libraries should we look at for implementing visualization?

Are there other tools that should be considered?

Suggestion Box

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This blog is for suggestions and comments. Any and all constructive comments are welcome.

Please check out the other blogs before putting comments here so that comments can be found in the most suitable forum.

Suggest a technology discussion topic

Any suggestions for technology discussion?

Overview: Rating, Ranking and Reputation

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Tools for rating and ranking submitted content are crucial to the functionality of the peer to patent project. They will make information more manageable and serve as a mechanism to incent appropriate participation.  We are eager to solicit the support of the wider community in addressing how to design the various rating, ranking, and reputation systems.  While we did workshops this spring focused on the rating and reputation questions, we want to concretize that learning by accreting the wisdom online and by conducting  additional workshops on this topic.

This posting summarizes the issues surrounding rating, ranking and reputation.

We anticipate three types of rating/ranking/reputation activity (as described more in detail in the Use Case document):

1) Ranking the claims of a patent application to identify the most relevant/representative ones.  PURPOSE/GOAL: focus community attention and labor where most needed

2) Ranking by peer reviewers of prior art submitted by the community in response to a patent application.  PURPOSE/GOAL: create manageable and searchable output for patent examiner

3) Rating of community participant activity. PURPOSE/GOAL: to encourage the right kind of participation.
    Possible modes of rating/ranking:
    a) automatically based on submission of prior art or comments;
    b) rating by other participants of each other,
    c) rating of members of reviewers by the patent examiner,
    d) rating of members automatically based on the citation of their prior art and commentary on the file wrapper of the patent

The subsequent posts to this blog have more detailed questions about these three areas.

Ranking Claims

With regard to 1) (ranking claims):

What kind of system should be used to rank? Is a simple up or down vote good enough? It would be difficult to have the users put many claims into a particular order.  What about a system of tokens to identify most important claims (e.g. 3 tokens, each one placed on the most important claim)