Patentee Name Harmonisation - ecoom.be

2 NAME CLEANING
2.1 Legal form indication treatment
Description
A lot of organization names contain some kind of legal form indication (e.g. “INC.”, “LIMITED”,
“LTD.”). These legal form indications cause considerable name variation because of
abbreviations, spelling variations, and legal form variations of names.
The name of a company can mostly be separated from the legal form without changing the real
company name, although there are some exceptions of legal form that really are part of the
name (see below). Moving and harmonizing legal forms to a separate field can greatly reduce
the number of name variations.
The idea is to end up with the real name where non-relevant legal form indications are
removed. It is not the intention to mutilate the organization name; the name still has to be
complete and comprehensible. Whenever the legal form is part of the name, the legal form will
not be removed.
For example, “S.A.B.C.A.” or “SABCA” stands for “Société Anonyme Belge de Constructions
Aéronautiques”. “Société Anonyme” or “SA” is a legal form indication, but removing it from the
name would leave “BCA” or “Belge de Constructions Aéronautiques”, making the name hard to
recognize.
This also means that if there is any doubt that part of the name is a legal form indication, the
name should be left unchanged (some parts of a name can accidentally coincide with variations
or abbreviations of a legal form).
The legal form indications are not completely deleted. They are removed from the name but, at
the same time, the harmonized legal form is transferred to a different field. This gives the end
user the opportunity to decide on whether two names that are identical except for the legal
form should be considered the same entity.
For example, “IBM AG”, “IBM INCORPORATED” and “IBM INC” will all be harmonized to “IBM”
but, in a separate field, the first name will still be labeled as “AG” while the other two names will
be labeled as “INCORPORATED”, leaving the choice to the user to query on the harmonized
name only (combining all three names) or to query on the combination of the harmonized name
and the harmonized legal form (again splitting up the result between “IBM AG”, on the one
hand, and “IBM INCORPORATED”, including “IBM INCORPORATED” and “IBM INC”, on the
other).
Analysis
An official list of legal forms and their official abbreviations of all countries applying for patents
can be a starting point for the identification of legal forms, but it is not very useful due to all
kind of variations appearing in the patentee names.
An alternative approach is to index the last word of all organization names and check the top
occurring words. All words that are not common English words are potentially legal form
indications and can be checked in detail to see if they can be removed.
Table 13 contains the top 50 occurring last words after cleanup, along with the number of
names containing the word as a last word, the cumulative number of names for this word and
all higher ranked words, and the percentage of the cumulative number of names compared to
the total number of names (443,722). Last words are identified on the basis of the last
occurrence of a space in a name; then all non-(A-Z) and non-(0-9) characters are removed
resulting in a cleaned version of the last word. Appendix 3 contains the list of the top 200
occurring last words.
LAST WORD
(CLEANED)
Table 13: Top 50 occurring last words
NBR OF
NAMES CUM %
LAST WORD
(CLEANED)
NBR OF
NAMES CUM %
28