New analytics software and cloud-based services from IBM will let companies and their researchers more easily mine the Mt. Everest of documents contained in U.S. government and other worldwide patent and scientific databases, IBM officials said Thursday.
The company’s Strategic IP Insight Platform (SIIP) can help augment the performance of private-sector research and development programs, identify new market opportunities and drive innovation across an assortment of industries, officials said.
SIIP makes it “feasible to look at all the information that exists today and all the research that has already been carried out,” said Chris Moore, global business analytics and optimization leader for IBM Global Business Services.
We can get the information extracted, annotated and ready for people to search within hours of it being released by, say, a patent office, whereas manual curation takes weeks or months-that’s an important delay in the availability of valuable information.” – Griff Weber
Researchers can apply SIIP’s high-speed analytics tools against millions of documents from the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, the European Patent Office and World Intellectual Property Organization and the public domain portion of the U.S. National Library of Medicine’s MEDLINE database at the National Institutes of Health (NIH).
For companies, finding and analyzing the latest patent data and scientific research is critical for developing new products. SIIP automates the labor-intensive, time-consuming and costly process of manually sifting through a massive amount of patent documents. The ability for companies to accomplish content-curation tasks quickly is a key advantage, especially when it comes to newly published patent data.
“We can get the information extracted, annotated and ready for people to search within hours of it being released by, say, a patent office, whereas manual curation takes weeks or months-that’s an important delay in the availability of valuable information,” IBM research scientist Griff Weber told Breaking Gov.
Industry officials agreed. “In the competitive R&D environment, it’s critical to respond to changes in the patent landscape and quickly analyze data,” said John Kinney, a research fellow at DuPont. SIIP allows companies to “evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of our different research programs and to help focus our resources on the most promising areas.”
SIIP is delivered as software as service (SAS) to IBM clients, who access it through IBM SmartCloud technology (http://www.ibm.com/smartcloud). Deploying SIIP through the cloud reduces the cost to clients, who don’t have to maintain it as an in-house application, according to Ying Chen, an IBM research scientist.
The application was originally developed by IBM researchers to support the company’s patent and intellectual property strategy and help investigate new business opportunities. What’s distinctive about SIIP is its range of high-speed, real-time analytics delivered through the cloud combined with the availability of a huge amount of data that is updated in real time. “This end to end integration is extremely unique,” Chen said.
In a related development, IBM, collaborating with NIH, Bristol-Myers-Squibb, DuPont and Pfizer, used SIIP to extract chemical data from millions of patent documents and biomedical journals and create a database for use by researchers around the globe.
IBM announced Thursday that it had contributed the data to the NIH’s National Center for Biotechnology Information, part of the National Library of Medicine. IBM officials said the donation will let researchers more easily visualize important relationships among chemical compounds, which will aid in drug discovery and support advanced cancer research.
Unlike the SIIP SAS for IBM clients, the NIH chemical database can be used free of charge by the public.