Patentee Name Harmonisation - ecoom.be

Finally, as the replacements and removals in the search and replace statements can also lead to
leading or trailing spaces, names have to be checked for and trimmed of leading and trailing
spaces after removal of legal form indications.
Result
Legal form indications have been removed and harmonized at the end of names in 221,498
names, at the beginning of names in 1,216 names, and anywhere in the name in 2,865 names.
Moreover, words, commonly used in a company context, appearing as last words were
harmonized in 9,150 cases.
Since not all legal form indications have been identified, nor all spelling variations of identified
legal form indications have been identified and added to the list of search and replace
statements (because they would cause too many false matches), a significant number of names
will still contain legal form indications. However, the vast majority of legal form indications are
removed, with accuracy well above 99%.
Impact
From 437,336 unique names to 392,226 unique names, an additional reduction of 45,110
names, or a total reduction of 51,496 names (11.6%).
2.2 Common company word removal
Description
In addition to the legal form indication that can be removed as it is not really part of the name,
there are some other words commonly used in a company context that are not really distinctive
elements of a company name. Such words include “COMPANY”, “CORPORATION”,
“GESELLSHAFT” and “SOCIETE”.
The idea is that if two names are found that are completely identical except for these words, the
underlying organization name will be the same and these words can be removed.
Examples include “3COM” and “3COM CORPORATION”, “AMIC” and “AMIC COMPANY”, “BAUR
SPEZIALTIEFBAU” and “BAUR SPEZIALTIEFBAU GESELLSCHAFT”, “SOCIETE NOVATEC” and
“NOVATEC”.
In addition, legal forms identified but not removed in the previous step – legal form indication
treatment - are removed at this stage. Such legal forms as “KG” were not removed previously
because they are, to all intents and purposes, part of the name and removing them could make
the underlying name less comprehensible.
Common company word removal can mutilate organization names and make them less
understandable. However, the idea is not to use these common company word removal names
as final harmonized names but as some kind of technical search name that can be used to
identify name variations in the same organization.
Analysis
Common company words that can be removed were identified by using the last word index and
first word index employed in the previous step – legal form indication treatment - and a full text
index of the organization names.
Firstly, the occurrence of “CORPORATION”, “COMPANY”, “KG” and “GESELLSCHAFT” at the end
of names, identified but not always completely removed in the previous step – legal form
indication treatment - were analyzed by manually scanning for all spelling variations.
Table 19 contains all spelling variations of all common company words that can be deleted if
they appear at the end of a name.
Table 19: Common company words to be removed at the end of a name
KEYWORD NBR
"CORPORATION" 23,134
"CORP" 102
35