SO-TI offers online patent searches by subscription for periods of 1, 3, 6 and 12 months. Each of SO-TI’s four products present patent information in such a way as to facilitate evaluation of technological strengths and weaknesses of each company.
XLUS includes four kinds of ASP services. “XLUS Green” and “XLUS White” handle Japanese published patent applications. “XLUS Eagle G” and “XLUS Eagle W” deal with the U.S. patents.
An interface screen of “XLUS Eagle G” is shown below. Any idea may be input into the query box in the form of natural language sentences. Alternatively, a user may copy and paste text data from other sources including academic papers and websites of other companies. One hundred relevant patents will be retrieved immediately. XLUS does not necessarily require a user to prepare a search formula. Therefore, even without much knowledge of the technology to be searched, retrievals and screening analyses can be conducted.
One of the core technologies of SO-TI resides in the original way in which search results are presented. In order to illustrate the similarity and technological relationships among patents, XLUS produces a radar chart. The distances between dots indicate the degree of similarity. The radar charts of XLUS allow a user to obtain a panoramic view of retrieved patents and provide extensive information that is intuitively understandable.
An example of XLUS EagleG (100 closest hits)
An example of XLUS EagleW (1,000 closest hits)
In order to search for relevant patents, XLUS utilizes a scheme called “tf-idf.” Using this scheme, the similarity between documents is calculated. The recent introduction of parallel computing technology has enabled XLUS to perform tremendous quantities of calculations within a few seconds. More than forty million words including compound terms appearing in all United States Patents are utilized in the retrieval. The accuracy of the search is ensured even if the number of patents to be retrieved continues to increase.
It takes much effort and time to conduct a patent landscape search and a state-of-the-art search, which are important for determining the direction of research activities. Most of the time is spent reading the retrieved documents to categorize them. Such human-based categorization tends to be subjective, and the output varies depending on the skill of the individual. In contrast, “XLUS Eagle W” electronically categorizes thousands of patents into clusters and places clusters that are similar to each other in the same area. Thus, an objective output can be obtained very quickly.