Patentee Name Harmonisation - ecoom.be

Some legal form indications are not removed from the name because they are, to all intents and
purposes, part of the name and removing them could make the underlying name less
comprehensible. A typical example is the German Kommanditgesellschaft, abbreviated as “KG”.
The part “gesellschaft” is part of the full name in a significant number of cases, as in “ESPE
STIFTUNG & CO. PRODUKTION - UND VERTRIEBS KG”. To prevent mutilation of these kinds of
name, “KG” will not be removed from the name. In one of the next steps - common company
word removal - “KG” will be removed to obtain a reduced name that can be used for searching
related names.
Table 15 also shows that the order of removing and harmonizing legal form indications is
important. It is clear that " + CO. AG" should be replaced with “ & COMPANY” before removing “
AG”.
All 1,060 spelling variations of legal forms occurring at the end of names were converted in
search and replace statements or rules, as listed in Table 15. All these rules and spelling
variations were validated. For every rule or spelling variation, all names containing the spelling
variation were scanned to be certain that the rule only affects actual legal form indications. If
the number of occurrences was higher than 500 (47 of the 1,060 spelling variations), only a
sample of 500 names was checked.
A rule or search and replace statement is withheld only if more than 99% of found spelling
variations are actually legal form indications. As the vast majority of rules resulted in 0
mistakes, the overall accuracy is greater than 99%.
The full list of all search and replace statements for legal forms to be removed at the end of a
name can be found in Appendix 2.
It has to be stressed that the objective is not to maximize the total number of matches (at the
cost of introducing mismatches) but to minimize the number of mismatches given a reasonable
number of matches.
This means that a considerable number of legal form indications will still be present in the
names after legal form removal. On the one hand, only legal forms that were identified on the
basis of the top 40 occurring last words were removed and harmonized, leaving a substantial
number of legal forms unchanged. On the other hand, not all spelling variations of identified
legal form indications were removed because some of the occurrences might have nothing to do
with legal form indications but may be mere coincidences.
In addition to the real legal form removal and harmonization, some other words, commonly
used in a company context, appearing as last words were also harmonized:
• “CO” was harmonized to “COMPANY”. Preceding “+”, “AND”, “U”, or “UND” were harmonized
to “&”
• “AND” preceding “COMPANY” was harmonized to “&”
• “ CORP” was harmonized to “ CORPORATION”
• “ E C.” was harmonized to “ & COMPANY”
• “ & C.” and “ & C” were harmonized to “ & COMPANY”
At this stage, only legal form indications appearing at the end of a name were removed and
harmonized. In some countries, legal form indications can also appear in front of company
names. The approach described above for last words can also be used for first words.
Table 17 contains the top 50 occurring first words after cleanup, together with the number of
names containing the word as a first 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). First words are identified on the basis of the first
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 first word. Appendix 4 contains the list of the top 200
occurring first words.
FIRST WORD
(CLEANED)
Table 17: Top 50 occurring first words
NBR
NAMES CUM %
FIRST WORD
(CLEANED)
NBR
NAMES CUM %
32