For the next two days, I will be covering the latest developments at Vienna’s Information Retrieval Facility Symposium (IRFS). It is a meeting of patent experts and business leaders and is designed to address the challenges that face those who operate in the emerging industry of patent information retrieval.

The overarching theme for the convention is one of patent experts meeting information scientists and opening up a meaningful dialogue. Hopefully there will be a merging of minds, finding common ground; you get the idea.

According to joint IRF Chairman Francisco Webber, there are many complex issues of transferring knowledge between science and business, what the IRFS hopes to identify is the shortcomings in the Intellectual Property (IP) world as well as the methods and potential solutions from the Information Retrieval (IR) sector.

Keith Van Rijsbergen, Webber’s co-Chairman and professor of Computing Science at the University of Glasgow, also talked about how tools for IR specialists are somewhat lacking. There are also issues that include how users of the future will utilise the next generation of patent searching technology. This could apply to organisations gaining a competitive advantage by monitoring others patent search audit trails. In parallel, the industry will see a rise of ‘naïve’ rather than ‘expert’ searchers over the next decade.

Of the many issues still to be put to the floor, it was discussed how government and business alike are not utilising available patent information to assist with their commercial interests. Open Access is also considered to be a central aspect of the innovation cycle of IP, IR and IRF

Of the other big topics to come will be the difficulties overcoming the language gap around the globe as well as patent search technology. More to follow…

A full analysis on the future of patent search technology will feature in December’s issue of IWR