Blazing Dawn Software's Family-izerTM 2.5

Patent Family Retrieval Tool

This is Blazing Dawn Software's Family-izer patent family retrieval tool. Great for one patent or hundreds! If your list of patents contains multiple members of a family, Family-izer provides the family list only once and then tags all subsequent patents in that family as being a member. That makes it easy to review a company's patent portfolio by highlighting only the unique patent families that the portfolio contains.

Don't want to bother with a plug-in? Then try our new, no plug-in page! Just be patient. There is no progress indicator while the families are being retrieved.

To get more details (such as full country names, publication dates and Kind Code descriptions) for a single patent, try Family-izerTM Solo.

Please send any comments or suggestions to Blazing Dawn Software (contact e-mail address is on the Blazing Dawn Home page).

Instructions

If you see a message to download the revWeb or LiveCode plugin, please do so now. Internet Explorer users on WINDOWS must be logged in as an administrator in order to install the plugin. However, Firefox users on WINDOWS will be able to install the plugin regardless of how they are logged in.

If the buttons do not work when you first click on them, click your mouse anywhere in the white space outside of Family-izer. The buttons will then work.

Type or paste a list of patents and/or published patent applications into the field on the left. Unless it is a US patent or published application number, a two-letter country code is required. The patent numbers can be with or without commas (5000000 or 5,000,000). The published applications can be with or without slashes (20020000001 or 2002/0000001; WO2004/012345 or WO2004012345), but no letters are permitted other than the country code or the upper case "RE" of US reissue patents. Once you have entered your list, click the Family-ize button. The list of patents and/or published applications is first sorted, so the results will be in lowest to highest numbers regardless of the order in the field on the left (patent numbers starting with a letter, e.g., reissue patents, will be retrieved first). Then, the field on the right will start filling up with patent families. As the program progresses, if a patent or published application is already listed in a preceding family, its family will not be repeated. Instead, you will see a result that says that the it is in the same family as _______.

You can limit the family data to just related U.S. patents and published applications, or you can retrieve related patents and/or published application numbers for all of the countries that the INPADOC database (see below) contains. Just select the corresponding radio button.

Progress is shown in the little field under the Family-ize and Clear All buttons. Once all the patent families have been retrieved, you will hear a beep and the word "Done" will appear in the progress field. The results are shown in an easy-to-read table.

Statistical Information: There is statistical information in the two right-most columns. The first column shows the total number of family members. If you chose the "International" option, the second column shows the number of unique countries and/or regions that are in the family. If you chose the "US only" option, the second column is always blank.

You can copy a tab-delimited list of the results to the clipboard by clicking the "Copy Families to Clipboard" button. You can then paste that list into a word processing document and convert it to a table, or paste it directly into a spreadsheet.

How Family-izer Works

Patent family information is retrieved from the Euorpean Patent Office's INPADOC (International Patent Documentation Center) patent family database. Family-izer uses a technique called Simple Open Access Protocol (SOAP) to query the EPO's Open Patent Services system (OPS) which provides access to INPADOC.

What's New in Version 2.5: added the two statistical information columns.


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