How do we source and process the global patent data?
Raw data is collected directly from global patent offices (e.g. USPTO & EPO). This data is sourced on a weekly basis and fed into our state of the art data consolidation workflow, where we cleanse, standardize and further enrich the data by tagging it to our industry-leading proprietary GlobalData sector taxonomies. This enables us to show you highly focused patents relevant to your specific criteria.
How do we tag the patents to specific: Companies, Sectors, ICs and Themes?
We identify the current assignee (owner) of an invention and match it to a company in our company-level hierarchy. This enables us to identify the complete invention portfolio of top patenting companies.
Global patents are classified according to their subject applicability via specific matter data in the form of classifications like CPC (Cooperative Patent Classification). We leverage these CPCs and tag them to a specific industry, and even sector within that industry. Over the years, GlobalData has curated prominent companies relevant to sectors within an industry and since our efforts involve creating companies' invention portfolios, we also provide these patents in that particular sector view.
GlobalData is at the forefront of employing machine learning and AI to make the data analytics ready and more discoverable. We identify semantic concepts around themes and retrieve relevant patents based on semantic searches. We further enhance our precision by leveraging the definitions of CPCs.
How and why do we carry out Legal Status Harmonization?
Patents, as assets, can be sold, licensed, and have a definite life term. In fact, they can exist in hundreds of different states throughout their life time. We’re collating data from global patenting authorities and each one has different legislation around protecting IP. In this effort, we harmonize all these variations into 21 specific categories, which enable our customers to retrieve all patents in a given state across any jurisdiction. We further infer the current legal state as being active, inactive, or terminated.
To find out our patent key lists and how each graph included in these lists is calculated, please see our Patent Key Lists and Graph Calculation Logic document.