Alerting Companies through On-Line Patent Trend Analysis

In a rapidly changing technology environment, companies are seeking reliable and adequate methods or tools to watch and monitor technological changes. The system introduced in this work-Patent Alert System (PAS)-automatically and systematically extracts patent data, which is a well-known and rich source of technological change and extracts the trend changes on the obtained data set. The PAS is initially set or configured to a technology class or subclass on which the users want to be informed of the trend changes. It retrieves the data of associated patent counts by the use of existing XML (Extended Markup Language) schemes of patent offices. Trend analysis is performed through a trend extraction algorithm. Data capture and trend extraction is turned off until alert is made by the user. Trends found in the patent data are expressed as the time evolution of patent and technology with the following symbols: upward (+), downward (-), and steady (stabilized). Consequently, these trends are used to generate alerts, which are forwarded on-line to the people who request/set the alerts. With the proposed software, it is possible evaluate the value of existing technologies and decide on whether the owned technology is trendy or not. Moreover, promising technologies and corresponding investment areas can be determined and irrelevant investments can be avoided. As a consequence, all these findings can be used to establish a long-term strategic technology plan.