PatentInspiration supports two types of classification codes.
- CPC (Cooperative Patent Classification): It is a joint effort from the EPO (European Patent Office) and the USPTO (United States Patent & Trademark Office) to unify their classification sytems. More information can be found on http://www.cpcinfo.org.
- IPC (International Patent Classification): Established by Strasbourg Agreement 1971. More information can be found on http://www.wipo.int/classifications/ipc/en/
Classification codes are assigned by patent officers to patents at the time of application, in order to classify them according to their technical content. Classification codes are hierarchically structured and have different levels of detail (Section, MainClass, SubClass, MainGroup, Full Code). This makes them a highly ordered and objective system for classifying patent content. Classification codes can refer to application domains (e.g., medicine, agriculture), to specific technologies (e.g , ultrasound), or even to specific chemistries (e.g., heterocyclic compounds).
What does this analysis do?
The code analysis gives an overview of the classification codes that are given to the patents in the patent pool.
How does it work?
Individual classification codes are extracted from the bibliographic data. The Code analysis analyzes the classification codes at one level, by default the MainGroup level. The analysis can also be reconfigured to analyze classifications codes at Section, MainClass or SubClass level, or in full detail (i.e., the exact code). Reconfiguration can be done by clicking on the gear icon in the analysis box on the Analysis page, or by clicking on Actions > Configure on the Visualization page.
The counts shown for each classification code are the number of unique patents using this code.
How to operate the results?
By default, the donut chart shows the top code occurrences on the MainGroup level. You can change the level of analysis in the configuration form.
There is also a table view provided, giving the exact amount of code occurrences in the patent pool. When moving over the table, a tooltip shows more details on each classification code (description and activity).
In the treemap, you can get an overview of the classification code tree structure and you can zoom in by clicking on the squares.
Finally, you can export the analysis to Excel to get a more detailed insight into the codes linked to the patent numbers.
What does it tell me?
Codes give a quick insight in the technological content of the patents (other useful analyses are technology analysis, field analysis and text analysis)
Codes can represent technologies, applications or combinations of these. The results of the analysis thus give insight into which applications and technologies are linked to your search term. Depending on the wanted outcome you can choose to extract the fitting codes and screen them further or use them for a new iteration in your search. Selection is done manually.