I. Reform of international patent classification
This reform is the most thorough reform since the establishment of IPC system. It has gone through six years, during which dozens of classification experts and senior examiners from patent offices around the world have devoted themselves to the reform of IPC and various research activities to improve the retrieval efficiency of IPC. At present, the reform of IPC has been completed, and the reformed IPC (eighth edition) was officially launched on June 65438+1 October1day, 2006.
The value of 1. Industrial process control (abbreviation of industrial process control)
IPC is a language-independent patent document retrieval and management tool, which can be retrieved independently of language, synonyms and technical terms, and is a tool for obtaining unified classification of patent documents in various countries. At present, more than 100 countries use IPC to retrieve and manage patent documents. In some countries, IPC is even the only retrieval tool.
In addition, the ECLA classification of the European Patent Office and the FI classification of the Japanese Patent Office are both developed on the basis of IPC.
2.2 development goals. Industrial process control (abbreviation of industrial process control)
In order to make IPC a patent classification suitable for patent documents and scientific and technological documents all over the world and ensure its effective use in electronic environment, it is necessary to reform its structure and revision method.
The development goal of IPC is to design IPC classification into a two-level classification system through reform to meet the needs of users with different needs. Among them, the core level is suitable for countries and the public with few patent documents; The advanced version is more detailed and accurate than the basic version, which is suitable for international patent literature retrieval. The revision of IPC needs to be consistent with the continuity of professional technology development, and should be completed in a low-cost and fast way based on modern electronic communication technology. Revision procedures should constantly reflect the development of new technologies.
The specific contents of the reform are as follows.
① Establish a two-level model;
(2) releasing the IPC online version;
③ Shorten the revision cycle;
(4) Reclassify the expired patent documents and establish a master classification database.
Second, the division of the two versions.
1. Basic Edition
One of the basic characteristics of the reformed IPC is a two-level structure system consisting of a basic version and an advanced version. The basic edition classification is compulsory classification, which is mainly used to disseminate information and retrieve a small number of patent documents, and its users are smaller patent offices and the public. Due to the popularity of basic classification, it needs to be relatively stable and the categories are relatively broad, including only part of IPC, such as departments, categories, subcategories and large groups, and some technical fields also include some higher-level groups. At present, there are only about 20,000 groups in the basic edition of the eighth edition, accounting for 30% of the content of the advanced edition, and it has been printed and published in five volumes.
2. Advanced Edition
Advanced classification is used to manage all patent or non-patent documents in the world, and will become an international standard and professional patent information retrieval tool. Any member of IPC alliance can choose advanced classification to search and manage patent literature. According to the survey data of WIPO (World Intellectual Property Organization), at present, the patent offices of 36 countries in the world promise to use the advanced version for classification. Patent documents and PCT minimum documents of China Intellectual Property Office both adopt advanced version classification. The eighth advanced edition contains all the contents of IPC, with more than 70,000 groups. Because of the rapid change, it is no longer published in paper form, but appears on WIPO website in the form of online version.
At present, 37 patent offices in the world use the advanced version, 18 patent offices use the basic version, 3 patent offices use both versions, and 1 patent offices use the subcategory table to classify permanent documents. Many large patent offices, such as SIPO (China Intellectual Property Office), EPO (European Patent Office), USPTO (United States Patent Office), JPO (Japan Patent Office), Germany (Germany) and Britain (United Kingdom), use advanced IPC to classify patent documents produced after 2006.
Third, the new function of online classification table
In order to use IPC under the network environment, further enhance its retrieval function, facilitate maintenance and revision, and combine it with other electronic retrieval tools, the World Intellectual Property Organization has developed an IPC publishing platform on its official website, and published the full text of the online English and French versions of the classification table, as well as the English and French versions of the revised contents of the basic and advanced versions of IPC. The basic and advanced IPC classification tables are displayed separately. Compared with the classification of previous versions, the IPC online version has added the following contents and functions.
① Additional information that is convenient for the use of the classification table, such as classification definition, information reference, classification examples, chemical structural formula and legend, etc.
(2) You can compare the classification and keyword query between the 7th and 8th editions;
③ the conversion between basic edition and advanced edition, and the conversion between English and French;
④ You can link IPC translations in various languages, such as German, Korean, Spanish, Czech, Hungarian, Japanese, Chinese, Russian and Dutch, as well as patent and non-patent retrieval databases, such as Espacenet, USPTO, PCT, JOPAL and ECLA.
⑤ The modified contents of the approved advanced version will continue to be extended to the electronic version of IPC;
⑥ Standardized sorting of technical topics can be carried out;
⑦ You can download IPC full-text main document data in XML format.
Fourth, revision work.
1. Revision cycle and procedure of basic IPC
In order to maintain relative stability, the basic IPC version is revised every three years, which is 2/5 shorter than the original five-year revision period. IPC revision working group is responsible for revision, and WIPO International Bureau is responsible for initiation. Invite members of the IPC Expert Committee and intergovernmental organizations as stipulated in Article 5(2) of the Strasbourg Agreement to make suggestions on the revision of the basic version with reference to the revision standards of the basic version. The revision requests and suggestions put forward by the International Bureau of the World Intellectual Property Organization, the Patent Office or organizations around the world are forwarded to the IPC revision working group or expert committee, and IPC decides whether to start these requests and suggestions. The approved revision request will be included in the revision project of IPC basic version. For each approved request, a bureau shall be designated as the project leader, responsible for drafting the project plan, including the work schedule. The person in charge of the project will organize relevant discussions in the IPC electronic forum, and the opinions of the bureaus on the revised project and the suggestions of the person in charge of the project report will be publicized in the forum.
2. Revision cycle and procedure of advanced IPC
In order to make full use of information technology and improve work efficiency, the revision of IPC Advanced Edition will be carried out on the Internet for a maximum of 3 months. In order to provide the Patent Office with enough time to adapt to the new advanced classification, the classification table will be published three months before the new version takes effect.
In order to achieve the goal of IPC reform in the most effective way, WIPO set up a special IPC Subcommittee to be responsible for the revision of the advanced version. Its Subcommittee members are from the Patent Office, which is responsible for the reclassification of over 20% of the minimum PCT documents. At present, only the United States, Japan, Europe and Russia meet this standard. Therefore, the Subcommittee is currently composed of the above four bureaus and the International Bureau. The composition of the sub-committee is re-evaluated every three years, and the evaluation standard is the actual work performance of the re-classification work of each bureau. Modify the program in advance mainly following the following principles.
① In the revision of IPC, use the same titles and definitions of existing classification positions of ECLA, FI and USPC to the maximum extent;
(2) IPC revision projects established on the basis of effective resources provided by the reclassification work carried out by various bureaus are preferred. The Special Subcommittee shall weigh the costs/benefits of the revised proposals put forward by the Bureau and evaluate them. Cost/benefit measurement is usually based on the ratio between reclassification workload and revision retrieval efficiency;
(3) In order to facilitate the existing technology retrieval by each bureau and maintain the integrity of the retrieved documents, the member bureaus of the special committee are required to give the shortest implementation time and complete the reclassification of overdue documents within a time limit.
Verb (abbreviation for verb) reclassification and main classification database
The reformed IPC needs a Master Classification Database (MCD) dedicated to storing and managing patent literature classification data, including bibliographic data of patent literature and non-patent literature worldwide. The main classification database allows the current version of IPC to complete patent search, eliminating the user's dependence on replacing different versions of IPC. Search only needs a single version of IPC, and the classification numbers of IPC 1 ~ IPC 7 do not need to be mixed. Therefore, it is required to reclassify all expired patent documents, and all documents published after June 65438+1 October12006 should be classified by using the current IPC8.
In view of the fact that EPO's DOCDB database basically meets the requirements of being the main classification database of IPC, it is decided to upgrade the DOCDB database as the main classification database of IPC after transformation. The maintenance of this database is also the responsibility of the European Patent Office. DOCDB database was established in the early 1970s, and it was mainly used to retrieve the patent documents of early international patent organizations, and the data collected was limited to patent documents. With the continuous expansion of data collection, more than 70 international patent organizations and 54 million patents have been collected. In addition, all patent institutions and international patent organizations that are willing to submit the data of their patent literature description projects have submitted data to the database one after another, so the number of entries in the database is constantly expanding.
The reclassification of expired patent documents in MCD database by European Patent Office depends on the reclassification of domestic documents by various bureaus. At present, 28 bureaus have indicated that they will be reclassified, and the reclassified data will enter the MCD database one after another.
Since the data in this database are provided by intellectual property offices around the world who voluntarily participate in this work, MCD database can be used free of charge, at least for intellectual property offices around the world.