Computer Science Research at Almaden - Intellectual Property Network (IPN)

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Intellectual Property Network

IBM's been the leader in US patents for the past 7 years!

IBM Patent Server

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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