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The stereotypical link between paper trails and bureaucracy is yet another closed chapter in the history of the Canadian Intellectual Property Office (CIPO). Earlier this year, CIPO, a special operating agency attached to Industry Canada, launched a $76-million automated patent system and created the largest text and image retrieval system in the federal government. Instead of spending hours wading through paper documents that occupied 11.2km of shelf space at CIPO, users can search the database and find patent documents usually within 10 seconds. About 1.3 million patents, dating back to 1920 and each consisting of almost 28 pages were transformed from paper to electronic form creating nearly two terabytes of data. Technically, this is the first...