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GCN Home > 10/11/04 issue

PTO brings the U.S. patent system into the digital age

By William Jackson, GCN Staff

For its first 200 years, the Patent and Trademark Office’s examiners shuffled millions of paper pages and sent mountains of them to warehouses.

“We employed large numbers of people just to manage paper,” said Edward Kazenske, deputy commissioner for patent planning and resources.

That was before PTO launched Patent eGov, an electronic application filing and management system. As of June 30 last year, paper no longer reigned at PTO.

“We were given clearance that the digital record would be the official file,” Kazenske said.

The shift became necessary in part because of the sheer volume of work. PTO issued the 6 millionth U.S. patent in 1999, and new submissions are increasing annually at double-digit percentage rates. Next year, PTO expects to receive about 340,000 applications, which also are growing more complex and larger.

PTO now measures its storage needs in terabytes rather than pages. An Image File Wrapper file system manages electronic documents, and examiners get immediate access through the Electronic Desktop Application Navigator, or eDAN, an interface that searches documents with subsecond response.

All there

“You never have a file you can’t find,” Kazenske said.

Patent eGov is the cornerstone of the office’s 21st Century Strategic Plan, which calls for replacing paper with end-to-end electronic management.

“This program is an integral part of our moving into the 21st century,” Kazenske said.

In July last year, when digital documents became official, applicants were given the option of filing electronically or on paper. PTO began rolling out the eDAN desktop application to examiners, eventually reaching 100 examiners per week. By August this year, all 3,600 examiners had the desktop tool, a month ahead of schedule.

There was no lack of work for the examiners, however, while they waited for eDAN. At any time as many as 500,000 patent applications are pending, and each examiner has a caseload of seven to 25 months’ worth of applications.

“We knew they had enough work on their dockets” to keep them busy until everyone had eDAN, Kazenske said.

Image-based files

At the heart of Patent eGov is an Oracle Corp. database management system with up to 300T of network storage from EMC Corp. of Hopkinton, Mass. The image-based files are accessible by up to 1,000 concurrent users of a high-performance Unix search engine developed by PTO.

A survey last year by Winter Corp. of Waltham, Mass., ranked PTO’s 5.4T database as the fifth largest transactional database in the world.

Although applicants still can file on paper if they choose, PTO converts all paper filings to digital images and manages them electronically.

More news on related topics: Content / Record Management, Executive Center, Great Managers, IT in Action, Management, Web Strategies



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