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www.elsevier.com/locate/worpatin

World Patent Information 28 (2006) 183–184

Conference report

Far East meets West in Vienna 2005

This regional patent information forum was the fourthin the now-established annual series, held this year duringNovember at the Renaissance Penta Hotel, Vienna. Itsaims are to promote collaboration and communicationbetween patent information suppliers from the Asiancountries and their users in the West, principally in Europe.However, as the usefulness and importance of this eventhave increased, attendance has widened and this yearincluded delegates from both the Russian Federation andthe USA.

In the last two years, the Japanese information teamof the EPO, based in Vienna, has sought to extend itsexpertise to cover two additional countries, China andSouth Korea. Accordingly, the half-day before theforum’s official opening consisted of short but detailedseminars on the patent law, documentation and searchsystems available from all three countries. These werewell worth attending in their own right, and gavesome good background to anyone attending the remain-ing 1 1

2days of the forum, particularly for first-time

visitors.Broadly speaking, the plenary sessions of the first half-

day were devoted to ‘‘procedural’’ matters, includingchanges in the Japanese utility model law, the administra-tive reorganisation of information services within theChinese patent office, the ongoing programme of EPO–Asia technical cooperation, (often in collaboration withthe EU), and a session on certain cultural aspects of patentenforcement in the Far East. The technical programmediscussed progress in a Korean–English machine translationsystem and improvements in the timeliness and content ofthe Japanese Patolis system.

The second day was devoted to a series of parallel work-shops, each approximately 1 1

2hours in duration. The

programme was designed to allow delegates to attend twosessions, one morning and one afternoon, each dedicatedto a specific aspect of Asian patent information. Theseincluded the coverage of Asian information within INPA-DOC, the free-of-charge search services from the Japanese,Chinese and Korean Patent Offices and the Japanesecommercial Patolis-e system. Discussion of the ‘‘how-to’’aspects of this information were covered in further work-shops on the Japanese FI classification and F-term

doi:10.1016/j.wpi.2006.01.011

indexing, a new project for deep-indexing of Chinesetraditional medicines and techniques of patent analysisusing tools from the Korean KIPRIS organisation. Inparallel with the workshops was a half-day panel discus-sion on the implementation of IPC8 by the Asian patentoffices.

Throughout the forum, there were good opportunitiesto meet with the delegates from the Asian patent offices.I must pay tribute to the many good interpreters, bothfrom the EPO and the national offices, who contributedsignificantly to the value of these discussions. A dedi-cated period for ‘‘coffee with the experts’’ provided arelaxed atmosphere in which anyone could bring veryspecific questions to the table, which proved a valuableaddition to the normal Q&A time allowed during theplenary.

In my comments as rapporteur, I remarked that when Ihad attended the first forum in 2002, I had expresseddoubts as to whether an annual event could be justified.The 2005 forum makes it clear that patent informationfrom Asia in all its aspects—policy, sources and searchsystems—is developing at such a speed that searchers inthe West really do benefit from a frequent updating peri-od. My main regret with regard to content of the sessionswas that it concentrated on free-of-charge services, andtended to downplay the role of the commercial sector. Anumber of commercial vendors load the same or similardatabases, and the industry-based searcher needs a mech-anism to gain the whole picture wherever possible. This isa relatively minor criticism, since many of the patent offi-ces of Asia are at the beginning of their involvement withthe information industry. They cannot be blamed for ini-tially taking the easy option of providing web access tosimple bibliographic search files. However, it is to behoped that the progress will not stop there, and that col-laboration with the private sector will increase as we seethe development of the next generation of search toolsand source files from this part of the world. Experiencein the West has shown us that patent offices—howeverwell meaning—are rarely in the position of being goodinformation system developers, and that the best toolsusually emerge from partnership with private-sectororganisations.

184 Conference report / World Patent Information 28 (2006) 183–184

The EPO deserves congratulations, not just on awell-organised forum, but on the unique ‘‘portal to theEast’’ which they provide to patent information users inEurope. I do not know of any other patent office, whichtakes this ‘‘gatekeeper’’ role so seriously, and with suchsuccess.

Stephen AdamsMagister Ltd., Crown House,

231 Kings Road, Reading,

RG1 4LS, United Kingdom

E-mail address: stevea@magister.co.uk