What other features are coming?

We've recently expanded to all patent classifications (not only the life sciences), added patent and application pdf images, RSS feeds for repeating queries, and the ability to search biological sequences.  In Genbank, these sequences are now connected to the Patent Lens records of the patents and patent applications, filling many holes in their records of what sequences are subject to patent claims.

The ability to query the patents database by the status of a patent (has it lapsed?  has it been withdrawn?) is in test now, and will be expanded. 

We have been testing a comments interface that will allow user annotation of patent documents.  Comments are archived, reviewable, and searchable.  They can relate to whole documents or particular positions within the documents such as the claims.

In coming years we plan to add patents and patent applications from additional jurisdictions such as China, Japan, Korea, India, South Africa and Brazil, as these countries make the electronic documents available for full-text searching (in many jurisdictions one can only search titles and abstracts of patent documents, which are sometimes misleading).  We also want to add biological sequences claimed in these jurisdictions, which currently cannot be searched easily.   If your jurisdiction of interest is not included in the Patent Lens now, you may want to contact the patent office in that jurisdiction to suggest the information be provided to the Patent Lens.

Other improvements we hope it will be possible to add include claims parsing, internal links to patents and publications referenced for definitions and prior art, connections to Pubchem and Pubmed, and Chinese and Japanese language searching in Unicode character texts.  If you have technology to contribute to collaboration on any of these ideas, please write to us (patents@cambia.org) or suggest a new project in our Discussion Forum.