- Intellectual Property Network
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IBM's
been the leader in US patents for the
past 7 years!
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he Almaden Digital Library team built the electronic patent library,
now called the Intellectual
Property Network (IPN), for providing easier access to patent
information at a lower cost than other on-line systems. The current
library has provided every IBM employee world-wide the ability to
search, view, print, download or fax any U.S. patent for the last
26 years from their desktop via an internet browser or via Lotus
Notes. Included in the web library is the ability to have direct
access to view images of the patents from a 1.3 Terabyte image repository
of over 3000 CDs.
IBM's
Intellectual Property Network is the biggest database on the web.
The internal site
has had approximately 7,000 users per week within IBM. Patents can
be downloaded in TIFF, PDF, PS and other formats and faxed to IBM
sites around the world. The library has been cited as an example of
IBM's leading edge technology, and has received outstanding praise
from numerous IBM and customer executives.
The IPNetwork
provides access to the bibliographic data and text of all claims
of numerous patents issued by the United States Patent & Trademark
Office (USPTO) from 1974 to present, plus some patents issued during
1971 to 1973.
The site currently
supports simple keyword, phrase, and patent number searches, as
well as the use of boolean operators. The following fields are now
searchable: Patent number, Title, Abstract, All Claims, Assignee,
Inventors, and Attorney/Agent.
The complete scanned image of a patent can be displayed. Images are available for patents issued from 1974 to present. There is a summary of missing or incomplete patent data and a list of what's new.
The patent references for the 26 years are hyperlinked, allowing users to locate and view prior art by navigating through all the cited patents. The link is bi-directional. Users can access not only the patents referenced by the examiners, but also access later patents that reference the existing document.
In addition, the server includes information on the USPTO maintenance fee status of all patents. This provides users information about renewal status of patents.
The site uses
IBM's Internet Connection Server to serve all patent information
pages to web clients. IBM's Net.Data cgi program serves as the web
gateway to the DB2 Universal Database, which retrieves from our
24 Gigabyte database of patent text information. IPN Guestbook and
FAQ pages are served via Lotus Domino webservers. All systems are
running on IBM RS/6000 and SP servers using the AIX operating system.
The multiple server nodes are robustly combined using Interactive
Network Dispatcher. The content is delivered to the Internet via
the IBM Global Network.
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