Contact: Mary Helen StoltzPhone: (573) 341-4966E-mail: [email protected]
STUDENT PROJECT ASSISTS ONLINE SEARCH FOR PATENTS
ROLLA, Mo. -- Would-be inventors may soon have an easier way to analyze patent claims and check the originality of their inventions, thanks to a search engine being developed by a University of Missouri-Rolla student.
Josh Sutterfield, a UMR graduate student in computer science from Springfield, Mo., is developing a computer search engine to help inventors analyze patent claims. He believes his search engine will function similarly to other search engines on the Web, and will benefit inventors, patent attorneys and patent officials who spend hours sorting through endless documents to determine whether an idea has a conflicting patent.
"Clearly it would be advantageous if the documents which are highly likely to be in conflict could be identified using an automated search," says Sutterfield. The search engine will eliminate the possibility for human error when determining the differences and similarities in patents.
Sutterfield's search engine involves running a computer program that counts occurrences of similar words by statistical methods and then establishes a frequency of each word occurring in a document. These frequencies could then be compared to the word frequencies in other documents to establish whether the documents were similar.
Sutterfield originally designed this search engine to simulate human understanding by comparing the meaning of documents using conceptual graphs to break down individual sentences into their basic parts. Sutterfield says that even comparing two documents in this manner would be a great feat. "A large-scale search, whereby one document is compared to hundreds, perhaps thousands of other documents, begins to seem quite unreasonable," he says.
A search engine with this capacity would be an asset to anyone who needs to search through patents for comparison, he says.
Sutterfield plans to have his search engine in working form by fall 2001. Preparation for the World Wide Web, however, will require more time, he says.
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