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