Patentee Name Harmonisation - ecoom.be

6.3 Introducing address information (in conjunction with name
similarity)
When engaging in name harmonizing efforts, it seems natural to consider the inclusion
of address information of patentees such as country code, city name, zip/post code and street
information. Address information can be used both for the additional identification of name
variations (patentees with partly different names but identical addresses) and for the
identification of potential mismatches (patentees having similar names but different
addresses) 14 .
Indeed, when both patentees share the same address, one might examine the
possibility of harmonizing them. Given sufficient levels of name similarity (to avoid mismatches
when different organizations share the same premises), there would appear to be a high
probability that patentees are identical in these cases. In order to assess whether such an
extension would be feasible, an analysis was performed to verify whether robust and
unambiguous criteria could be outlined. Consequently, we examined a sample of 5,000 EPO
applications. Names have been cleaned as described in section 4 - A content-driven name
harmonization approach focusing on accuracy - and addresses have been cleaned in a very
preliminary way (removal of all non-alphabetical characters). For those patentee names having
the same address (country, city and street), the Levenshtein distance measure has been
calculated and normalized for the varying lengths of names (absolute Levenshtein distance
divided by the length of the longest names). The obtained matches have been verified in terms
of correctness (is it reasonable, based on a quick verification of patentee information found, to
assume that both patentees are one and the same?).
Table 6 contains the 25 cleaned patentee names with the same address with the closest
relative Levenshtein distance out of the sample of 5,000 names. The absolute Levenshtein
distance and the result of the validation is also included: “=” means that names are variants;
“≈” means that names definitely have some relationship but not clear if it is the same legal
entity; and “≠” means that matched names are significantly different (but still can point to the
same legal entity; name can be significantly different because of name changes or mergers and
acquisitions).
Table 6: Differences in cleaned names of patentees with matched address
CLEANED NAME CLEANED NAME WITH MATCHED ABS REL VAL
ADRESS
DIST DIST
SCHNEIDERELECTRICINDUSTRYSAS SCHNEIDERELECTRICINDUSTRY 3 0,11 =
MERRELLPHARMACEUTICALS MERRELLDOWPHARMACEUTICALS 3 0,12 ≈
MITSUBISHICHEMICAL MITSUBISHIGASCHEMICAL 3 0,14 ≈
THGOLDSCHMIDT GOLDSCHMIDT 2 0,15 ≠
COSMAINTERNATIONAL MAGNAINTERNATIONAL 4 0,22 ≠
KUMIAICHEMICALINDUSTRY IHARACHEMICALINDUSTRY 5 0,23 ≠
TAKEDACHEMICALINDUSTRY WAKOPURECHEMICALINDUSTRY 6 0,25 ≠
SUMITOMOMETALINDUSTRY SUMITOMOELECTRICINDUSTRY 6 0,25 ≈
ACCENTURELLP ACCENTURE 3 0,25 =
MITSUBISHIDENKI MITSUBISHIKASEI 4 0,27 ≈
SHIBANAIAKIKO SHIBANAIHIROKO 4 0,29 ≈
RHONEPOULENCRORER RHONEPOULENCSANTE 5 0,29 ≈
GECMARCONI THEMARCONI 3 0,30 ≈
FORDGLOBALTECHNOLOGY VISTEONGLOBALTECHNOLOGY 7 0,30 ≠
BOEHRINGERINGELHEIM
INTERNATIONAL
BOEHRINGERINGELHEIMVETMEDICA 10 0,31 ≈
AUGWINKHAUS FIRMAAUGWINKHAUS 5 0,31 =
SGSTHOMSONMICROELECTRONIC STMICROELECTRONIC 8 0,32 ≈
MITSUBISHIGASCHEMICAL MITSUBISHIKASEI 7 0,33 ≈
ASAHIKASEIKOGYO ASAHIKASEI 5 0,33 ≈
JOHNSONJOHNSONCLINICAL ORTHOCLINICALDIAGNOSTICS 11 0,33 ≠
14 In addition, similar addresses appearing jointly with different patentee names might trigger an assessment
of ownership relationships. Such an approach can be beneficial to support legal entity harmonization efforts.
However, as explained in section 2 - Patentee name harmonization and legal entity harmonization, this lies
outside the scope of the methodology outlined in this paper, which is aimed at name harmonization.
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