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As information professionals continue to forge a path toward relevant results in an ever-changing environment of both content and technology, it is helpful to observe how various sectors of the broader economy manage their literature search and retrieval. The healthcare and medicine sectors seem to be constantly innovating in mobile technology; sales and marketing information focuses on real-time delivery; and legal information providers are shifting toward workflow solutions.
One sector of interest to searchers, by virtue of its need to find the proverbial needle in the haystack on a routine basis, has always been intellectual property, particularly patent literature. With the sheer volume of information contained in patent documents and the potential financial implications of an accurate or inaccurate search, getting it right goes directly to the bottom line. Thus, it comes as no surprise that patent information providers are charting a course toward innovation in the areas of semantic search and relevancy-based results.
One company that recently appeared on my radar screen as one to watch is Pantros IP (www.pantrosip.com). Not only is it enjoying rapid growth in the area of semantic search of international patent literature, but it is also in the final stages of development to move its proven search technology to the open web. And it shows no lack of confidence in its ability to do so, if you view its open challenge to Google via YouTube, a video I'll discuss later in this article.
PATENT ANALYTICS
Pantros IP is a patent analytics company. It provides a decision- support system that includes advanced linguistics patent search technology using Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA), graphical representation of patent search results, portfolio management software, and advanced analytics for measuring patent quality with citation and claim analysis. Its pioneering work integrates all these applications into a single enterprise- class software application, drawing from an international database that includes WIPO and several European, Japanese, and U.S. patents.
Pantros traces its U.S. roots back to the late 1990s in California, when a group of innovators began to research and develop applications for artificial intelligence and semantic search. They formed a company called Patent Cafe, Inc. Pantros acquired Patent Cafe in 2009. Renamed Pantros IP, Inc., it maintains an office and much of the original development team in...