The 2nd “Name Game” workshop on patent data will be held in Madrid, on December 9‐10, 2010, as part of the APE‐INV project, sponsored by the
European Science Foundation.
It builds upon the success of a similar initiative held in Paris in November 2009, also as part of the APE‐INV project, and it aims at convening several researchers interested into building inventor‐based patent datasets, which requires solving a number of technical problems and exchanging data and expertise. It will be hosted by IPP, the Instituto de Politicas y Bienes Publicos, of CSIC (Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas) and organized by Francesco Lissoni (KITES‐Bocconi) and Catalina Martinez (IPP‐CSIC).
APE-INV is a project funded by the European Science Foundation that aims at identifying inventions stemming from academic research through a reclassification by inventor of patents from PatStat, the EPO Worldwide Patent Statistical Database.
Such reclassification effort requires inventors’ names, surnames, and addresses to be parsed, matched, and filtered, in order to identify synonyms (that is names+surnames or addresses which are the same, although spelled differently) and to
disambiguate homonyms (verify whether two inventors with same name and surname are indeed the same person). Several algorithms have been produced in the recent past, either with reference to data from PatStat or from national patent offices.
One the objectives of the APE-INV project is to compare the accuracy and efficiency of such algorithms, and to involve as many researchers as possible in a collective research effort aimed at producing a shared database of inventors’ names, surnames, and addresses, linked to PatStat.
In order to achieve this objective APE-INV produces a number of PatStat-based benchmark databases, and invites all interested parties to test their algorithms against them. The present document (to be updated periodically) describes such benchmark databases, their rules of access, and provides guidelines on how to conduct the tests and how to report their results, in order to ensure comparability. Information is also provided on workshops that will be organized in order to allow a discussion of the results.
Objectives and Programme Approach
The main results expected by Ape-INV are there:
Sharing experiences for the creation of INV Database
to share expertise and methods among European (and US or Japanese) reearchers for the creation of an inventors’ database, one that will identify all different spelling variations of the inventor’s name, as well as the inventor’s different addresses and patents;
to share expertise and methods among European researchers for matching the inventors’ database with national databases of academic scientists, in order to produce comparable counts of academic patenting activity and to collect auxiliary information on academic inventors;
Producing a Database on Academic Patenting in Europe (APE-INV Database)
to produce a freely available database on “academic patenting in Europe”, that will contain reliable and comparable information on the contribution of European academic scientists to technology transfer via patenting, and that researchers will be able to update in the future.
Editing joint publications using the Data-set
to experiment the database opportunities, editing one or more joint publications containing original applications of the newly created databases;
Designing a Method to allow users to correct data
to devise a method for collecting the database users’ feedbacks on the quality of the data, one that will allow users to enter their own corrections to the identification errors. Users’ corrections are particularly important in this case, since the identification of inventors rely on algorithms that make use of information on each inventor’s social network: so users’ corrections to the identity of one inventor may lead to correct the identity of others.
Cooperating with established institutions in the field of patent data
A unique window of opportunity has been recently opened by the European Patent Office (EPO), and its collaboration with the OECD Patent Statistics Task Force for the creation of PATSTAT, a new database for statistical use (joint with WIPO, the World Intellectual Property Organization, and Eurostat).
APE-INV program will contribute to create a community of PATSTAT users, and to turn PATSTAT into a reference source for the worldwide community of social scientists engaged in science and technology studies. Besides making use of PATSTAT data, APE-INV will try to establish co-operation ties with all the insititutions involved in its development.
Participation to APE-INV
Currently, the APE-INV programme is supported by 9 ESF member organizations, namely:
• Austrian Science Fund (FWF)
• National Fund for Scientific Research (FNRS), Belgium
• Research Foundation Flanders (FWO), Belgium
• The National Foundation of Science, Higher Education and Technological Development of the Republic of Croatia (NZZ),
• Danish Social Science Research Council
• German Research Foundation (DFG)
• National Research Council (CNR), Italy
• Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO)
• Council for Scientific Research (CSIC), Spain
• Swedish Research Council (VR)
• Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF)
However, APE-INV is willing to enlarge the participation to other countries, in order to become a pan-European research networking programme. In addition, collaboration with scientists worldwide is encouraged, and will be pursued with the help of subsidiary funds.
