Patentee Name Harmonisation - ecoom.be

4.2.3 Spelling variation harmonization
Typographical errors and spelling mistakes are responsible for considerable name
variations. These kinds of error can be identified by assessing word similarities. Whilst this type
of analysis is straightforward for common English words, proper names usually require manual
validation efforts in order to ensure accuracy. For example, “AMTECH” and “IMTECH” only differ
in a single character but it would be incorrect to automatically assume that the names refer to
one and the same patentee. For common words, spelling and language variations can be
identified without ambiguity and, therefore, harmonized effortlessly. For example, “SYSTEM”,
“SYSTEMS”, “SYSTEMEN”, and “SYSTEMES” can all be harmonized to “SYSTEM” or “SYSTEMS”.
Spelling variation harmonization replaces all variants of common words with one harmonized
variant that will be used to match name variants.
4.2.4 Condensing
Significant name variations are also caused by word separation, punctuation, and nonalphanumerical
characters, which clearly have no relevance in identifying the distinctive
characteristics of a name (e.g. “3 COM” and “3COM”, and “AAF-MCQUAY”, “AAF MCQAY” and
“AAF – MCQAY”). Condensing removes all non-alphanumerical characters so that a harmonized
variant can be used to match names.
4.2.5 Umlaut harmonization
Although accented characters have already been replaced (see section 4.1.1 - Character
cleaning), German characters with a diacritic mark (umlaut: “ä”, “ö”, “ü”) still generate spelling
variations because words containing them can occur in three varieties, one with an umlaut (e.g.
“für”), an alternative spelling without an umlaut but with an additional “e” (e.g. “fuer”), and a
simplified form without both an umlaut and an additional “e” (e.g. “fur”). Umlaut harmonization
identifies and matches different variants of words including “ä”, “ö” and “ü”.
5 RESULTS AND IMPACT
The complete name cleaning and harmonization procedure has been applied to an
integrated set of EPO and USPTO patentee names. In the case of the EPO dataset, all 270,635
applicant names are included from all 1,600,812 EPO patent applications published between
1978 and 2004 (based on the EPO ESPACE ACCESS product). For USPTO data, all 223,665
assignee names are included from all 1,614,224 USPTO granted patents published between
1991 and 2003 (based on the USPTO Grant Red Book product). All names were converted to
uppercase. Combining these two datasets produced a name list of 443,722 unique patentee
names (after conversion to uppercase and removal of leading and trailing spaces). Of these
names, 50,578 appear both in EPO and USPTO; 173,087 only appear in USPTO, while 220,057
only appear in EPO.
As indicated previously, Appendix 1 contains a detailed description of the algorithms
that have been applied and a detailed analysis of the impact of the name cleaning and
harmonization procedure on the set of EPO and USPTO patentee names. In this section, we
highlight the major findings.
Overall, harmonization has reduced the number of unique patentee names by 17.6%,
from 443,722 to 365,866 names. The average number of patents per patentee increases from
7.2 before to 8.8, after harmonization.
13.5% or 49,449 of the harmonized names are matched with more than one original
patentee name. The distribution of the number of matched names is skewed, ranging from 2 to
51 original names, with an average of 2.6.
When names are matched, an average increase in patent volume of 7.2 patents is
observed. The most extreme case is IBM for which name harmonization results in an additional
12,704 patents. When comparing the number of additional patents allocated to harmonized
names with the highest volume pertaining to one of the matched set of names, an average
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